Hopscotch (11 page)

“I'm not smuggling anything.”

“I hear you saying it.” She was poised, neat, confident; she knew how to sit and what to do with her hands and she was sitting there working out exactly how high she could bill him before he balked at the price. “I fly a Bonanza,” she said. “Executive charters generally run fifty cents a linear mile—that's
for the plane, not per passenger. But this will run you more than that.”

“How much more?”

“Half again. Seventy-five cents a mile. And you're paying for the two trips I'll have to make empty. Two round trips, that's about forty-four hundred miles. Thirty-three hundred dollars, Mr. Murdison.”

“I didn't say I wanted to buy your airplane.”

She smiled. “If you want a better price why don't you try one of the commercial outfits down in Miami? Actually I think the airline fare to Saint Thomas is about sixty dollars.”

“Three thousand,” he said, “in cash.”

“That's agreeable but I get two hundred a day for me and the plane while I'm waiting for you in Miami.”

“All right,” he said. “Be there on October third. Where do you usually lay over?”

“There's a motel called the Flamingo a few blocks from the airport gate.”

“Fine. Check in with the desk every two hours after noon on the third.”

He dipped the fingers of his left hand into the flat wallet inside his jacket, extracted the envelope from it and put the envelope on the table. “That's five hundred. I'll give you another fifteen hundred when you pick us up at Coral Key and the rest when you pick us up at Charlotte Amalie for the return flight.”

“I guess that's fair enough. If you're making any deals with Maddox about papers you'll have to do that personally with him—I don't want to know anything about it.”

“I didn't say anything about papers, Mrs. Fleming.”

“So you didn't.” She put the envelope in her handbag; snapped the clasp shut and put the bag on the floor by her feet. “Now you may buy me a drink. Scotch mist, with Dewar's.”

At half-past one he was in her apartment without quite being sure why. “There was a Mr. Fleming,” she said. “He's a nice guy. One day we just decided neither one of us would be worth looking at across a breakfast table for the next thirty years.”

But she was vulnerable; it was evident in the way the apartment looked. It was a very personal place, she'd made it hers. The furniture looked Mexican: pale wood, very heavy with thick comfortable cushions. There were a couple of wicker armchairs with Indian patterns dyed into them. She had Navajo rugs on the walls and they looked as if she'd had them for a long time; the lower edges were frayed where cats had sharpened on them. The single painting was a limited-edition Georgia O'Keeffe reproduction. She had an air race trophy on an end table and the LP jackets by the stereo were thoroughly used clues to a taste in music which was catholic but not undiscriminating: she had Toscanini but not Fiedler, Ray Charles but not Bob Dylan,
Sgt. Pepper
but not the Stones, MJQ but not Brubeck.

The two cats were alley-bred grey tigers, aloof and athletic. They inspected Kendig. One chewed his finger. He let them prowl, not making a fuss over them. A little corner of his mind was pleased that there was a little flap cut into the screen at one
of the windowsills so that the cats could come and go. And she didn't baby-talk them. “They do care whether you like them or not,” she said, “but they're too dignified to let it show.”

When he kissed her she drew back and smiled to show she was willing but not serious.

They were not touching but he could feel her warmth and the rhythm of her breathing. She got up from the bed, trailing her fingers along his arm, and he lay staring at the ceiling until she came back from the loo. Her dark eyes were heavy with sleep; she gave him a soft-lipped kiss and he felt a pang of weary sadness. She sat up then, hair tangled around her face; she offered him a cigarette but he shook his head, withdrawn.

“You're a feline sort of man. I don't mean that unkindly.” She touched her lips to his hair and lay down against him. “I'm a feline sort of girl. But sometimes you just need somebody.”

“Yes.”

“Usually it's enough to be in the air. That's the only real freedom I know—being in motion in three dimensions.” She switched off the light. He thought of leaving but hadn't the desire to, nor reason to. Then she said, “Two strangers rutting in bed. But it's not as sad as it might be.”

“No.”

“You just talk a blue streak sometimes, don't you.”

She was fast asleep when he went down to his car. In the predawn half-light the furnace reddened and charred the sky: like a landscape out of Dickens.
She lived on the steep side of the hill that led up toward Vestavia. In the shadows he stole the front license plate off a Buick; the owner probably wouldn't notice its absence for a long time and then he'd chalk it up to accident or vandalism and the likelihood of its being reported to the police was remote. He mailed a letter to Ives and threaded the streets; by breakfast time he was a hundred miles toward the Georgia line. He ate in a truckers' café. It was when he returned to the car that he saw the glint of metal in the back seat.

It was a woman's compact the color of brass, mottled finish, monogrammed CJF in an engraved scroll. He opened it and saw himself in its round mirror but he couldn't find anything particularly feline about the face. When he snapped it shut it left a little powder on his fingers. He twisted to smudge the prints and dropped it into his pocket. Impulse or calculation? He wondered which had made her leave it there. She hoped he'd bring it back to her. Well he'd see her in Miami.

He crossed the state line and toward midday he was in the pines. Heat trembled off the blacktop. The road was narrow, badly graded for the curves, an upward lip at each side. He felt nagged by an unease he could neither place nor comprehend. It made him think about obtaining a revolver. But a gun was always to be regarded as the last of all last resorts; he had not shot, at anyone since 1944 in Italy and that had been in the lines, in uniform, shooting at helmeted
Wehrmacht
soldiers who were shooting back. The use of a gun was the admission of amateurism and the only thing Kendig had was his professionalism.

He drove slowly up the rutted track. Insects
talked in the heat. When he switched off he could hear the hot engine ping with contractions and distantly the roughhousing of the river. He sat in the car scrutinizing the dappled shadows—the edge of the forest, the barn, the abandoned machinery, the disheveled house. He sensed the place was empty. When he felt sure of it he walked up to the porch.

There was no one around and no one had been there; the telltales he'd left had not been disturbed except for the string at the bottom of the screen door and that likely had been a squirrel or perhaps during the night a raccoon.

He brought his purchases inside and retrieved the boxed unfinished typescript from its hiding place in the rusted wreckage of the DeSoto. For the next two hours he sat still, reading what he'd written.

The book was a brusque account of facts assembled in chains. It struck him now for the first time that what he was writing was essentially a moral outcry and that impressed him as a curious thing because he hadn't had that in mind. Yet it was unquestionably an outraged narrative despite its matter-of-fact tone. When he made this discovery it caused him to realize that he must add something to the book that he had not intended including: there had to be a memoir, a self-history (however brief) to establish his boná-fides—not his credentials or sources but his motives.

The book had become more than a gambit; it had been born of him and now claimed its own existence. In no way did that negate the game itself; but he saw that in order to maintain the illusion of freedom he had to complete the book not as a means but as an end. Otherwise it was only a sham—toy
money, counters on a game board. It had earned for itself the right to be much more than that; and if he failed in this new responsibility it made the game meaningless.

He put a new page in the typewriter.

– 11 –

T
HEY WERE RANKED
in three lines, the back row standing and the middle row kneeling and the front row sitting down with their arms around their calves. They were all grinning because they'd survived Basic Training. Three of the four corners had broken off the four-by-five print and it had faded with age.

The second print was a grainy enlargement of a small section of the first. It showed one young face and parts of the adjacent two.

Ross said, “Kendig all right. But you'd have to know him to tell. This was a nineteen-year-old kid.”

“It's the only picture of him we've got, so far,” Cutter said.

“Where'd it come from?”

“Myerson went through the Army personnel records division in Saint Louis. This belonged to some guy who went through boot camp with Kendig. Then they shipped out to different outfits. This guy never saw Kendig again.”

Ross put the photographs down and went back to packing things into his attaché case. “Doesn't he have any friends? I mean everybody's got friends.”

“With the possible exception of Kendig. Well there was me for a while. And there was a woman.”

“Would he get in touch with her?”

“He might, if he knows a medium,” Cutter said drily. “She's been dead for three years.”

Ross looked at him sharply. “Three years. That was about the time he got his cover blown, wasn't it?”

“Around then, yes.”

“One thing have anything to do with the other?”

“I don't know. You'd have to ask Kendig.”

“I will.”

“Sure,” Cutter said. He was smiling but there were subtle vibrating signs of great controlled pressures in him. “Look, don't leave yourself absolutely wide open, will you?”

“I'll be careful.”

“All the time I knew him I never saw him sleep more than four hours at a stretch. Kendig's got a consummate control of time. And he knows how to pace himself. If you ever get close to him you've got to intercept him, you can't chase him—he'll outrun you every time.”

“You make him sound like some kind of four-minute-miler.”

“He's fifty-three years old but I imagine he could run the shoe leather off you, Ross, if he had a hundred yards' head start.”

“But he's no sprinter?”

“He doesn't let himself get caught in a position where he needs to sprint.”

Ross picked up the attaché case and hung his jacket over his shoulder by one fingertip. “I guess that's everything. My bag's down in the car.”

“Good hunting,” Cutter told him. “I guess I ought to say something like that.”

“You're just absolutely convinced it's a blind alley, aren't you.”

“Sure. But it may give us a lead. Get it all on tape and we'll all go over it when you bring it back.”

Ross swallowed that without a retort and went out. He threw the attaché case in the back seat and pulled out on the highway to Dulles.

On the plane he read the copystats of the fifty-one pages they now had of Kendig's exposé. The latest sixteen-page chapter had arrived at the French publisher's office four days ago, having been posted in Charleston on the day after James Butler had set sail from that port. The typescript was double-spaced, which made it easy to read between the lines. You had to give the bastard credit for effective understatement. Another few chapters like these and he'd blow the lid off every capital that counted.

It was cleverly conceived and executed; there was no innuendo, every statement was flat and factual. A government could deny it or confirm it but nobody could accuse Kendig of slanting it or getting things out of context. He simply didn't go in for interpretation.

The matter of the Hammarskjöld assassination—chapter three—was a raw exposition of meetings, decisions taken at specific hours on specific days by named individuals and then a day-by-day trace of itemized actions by individuals, again named, effecting the mechanics of the event. There were no suggestive interpolations, no sub-text. Pages 47 and 48 were missing, withheld by Kendig; page 46 ended with the line, “Documentary evidence to support these facts, and witnesses who took part or observed these events, are as fol-”

Of course it was unsupported testimony but
there'd been so many people involved and once the thing was published they'd all be on the defensive, details would be demanded of them, sooner or later one of them would crack and spill his guts out of guilt or disgust or desperation.

In a fine sense it was history and didn't matter any more but to discount it on that basis would be absurd and specious. Kendig had them over a barrel and the barrel was headed right over the falls. Coming on the heels of the Nixon spectacle a book like this would wreak unimaginable damage because the structure of human faith was so weakened already; at least Ross saw it so, his own convictions having undergone severe questionings and doubts in the past few years. But in the end it came back to the same thing for him: there was still something worth preserving and worth fighting to preserve.

Casablanca was new to him but he'd been in Tangier and the ambience was the same—the startling juxtaposition of unspeakable poverty and first-class modernity. It was a resort city and a capital of commerce and there wasn't anything in common with the Warner Brothers sets of the old movie that everybody knew. A Mercedes diesel taxi took him to the Hilton and he ate a big dinner and slept the clock around, trying to overcome the glaze of jet lag. In the morning he paid his call on the Agency's stringer, a beefy sweating backslapper named Ilfeld who was Assistant to the Commercial Secretary at the consulate. Ilfeld brought along a couple of goons in wilted seersucker when they went down to meet the
Cape of Good Hope
. The port was shallow and not very big and there wasn't much nautical
traffic; Rabat was only a little way up the coast and that was most ships' preferred port of call.