Metzger's Dog (11 page)

15
                  
“Where are we?” asked Margaret. “The Park in Rear bar.” Chinese Gordon leaned his left elbow on the window and signaled for a left turn.

“The what?”

“See?” He pointed to the five-foot fire-red neon sign that flashed “PARK IN REAR.” Above it, an unlighted but ornately filigreed script said the something Cafe and Bistro, but Margaret wasn’t sure if she could have read it in daylight.

“Charming.”

Chinese Gordon pulled the car into the shadowy alley and stopped it beside a 1968 Chevrolet painted mainly in gray primer dappled with red rustproofing. As Margaret got out she noticed that the parking lot was vast, stretching in a hundred-yard rectangle along the solid line of plain walls and loading docks, and that at least fifty or sixty cars were sitting at haphazard angles wherever their owners had felt like stopping them. “Looks like a demolition derby.”

“No, just Friday night at the Park in Rear. We’ll be out of here before they all try to get out that alley, so we’ll miss most of the fun.”

“I could pass up all of the fun.”

“If we want to talk to Immelmann tonight, this has got to be it. He only goes to Ma Maison on Thursdays.”

He pulled the door open, and the stale, smoky air of the place rushed out, bringing with it a tenor voice shouting in a southern accent over a driving bass guitar. Margaret shuddered involuntarily and looked around her. It seemed to be one cavernous room dominated by a marble bar that must have been a hundred feet long. She counted seven barmaids scurrying up and down behind it, and four men who stood along the back wall, big men with the hard, scanning eyes of policemen.

All over the room were tables where people sat drinking and yelling against the invincible solidity of the bass guitars. The music had already pummeled her senses so that she didn’t hear it as music anymore. It was like being inside a great chugging engine composed of pounding pistons and some kind of undifferentiated roar. She followed Chinese Gordon through a crowd of tall men holding beer bottles, her face at chest level beside all of these bodies, and far too close, so her view was of plaid shirts and cowboy shirts, pockets with cigarette packs stuffed into them, wet underarms and then a greenish-blue tattoo of something with wings and a sword and some reddish flames. In front of her was only Chinese Gordon’s back, and she felt an urge to cling to him but stifled it and only tried to make herself smaller to thread her way through behind him.

As she passed one man he was shouting along with the music, so she finally had the words blasted into her face along with an odorous, beery mist that seemed to go with the general smell of male sweat: “If that’s all you want, little lady, you already got it.” Perfect, she thought. Immelmann would be right at home. He always called his girlfriends “Little Lady” or “Sunshine” because he couldn’t remember their names.

At the tables there seemed to be a lot of people wearing hats—young women in cowboy hats, a man in a blue Dodger baseball cap, a few that bore trademarks like Caterpillar or Peterbilt. There was even an olive-drab one with sergeant’s stripes stenciled on it in black.

She followed Chinese Gordon to a darker corner, where Immelmann and Kepler sat drinking beer out of bottles and then snapping their heads back to down shots of whiskey. Immelmann stood up when they approached, and he pulled out a chair for Margaret. Kepler nodded and held up a hand to call for the waitress, who seemed to be hovering nearby to watch the hand. She scurried to his side on impossibly high platform shoes that made Margaret wince, leaned over to listen, then strutted away in a parody of efficiency.

Chinese Gordon spoke, and she was surprised when she realized she could hear him. The noise seemed to have subsided imperceptibly. “We came to talk to you about another idea we’ve got.”

Immelmann smiled and waved a big hand in Kepler’s direction. “That’s a coincidence, Chinese. I wanted to talk to you about the same thing. I was just telling Kepler.”

“Don’t listen to him, Chinese,” Kepler said. “The man is a retard. It’s an insult to have to take him seriously, and I do it only out of charity.”

“What’s your idea?” Margaret asked Immelmann.

“Thank you for asking, honey.” There it was, she thought. He was probably too drunk to remember the name. “What we’ve got here is a chance for an investment. You remember I come from farm country.”

Kepler said, “I’d never have guessed.”

Immelmann ignored him. “Well, we’ve got a chance to triple our money—quadruple it in a year or two if we’re willing to invest it now. There’s a chance to buy a whole lot of land in Saskatchewan for very little right now.”

“No doubt,” said Chinese Gordon. “It’s fifty below zero there most of the winter.”

“That’s the beauty of it,” Immelmann said. “That’s why we can pick up prime acreage for the asking. Miles and miles of it.”

“What’s the idea? Oil? Minerals?” Chinese Gordon asked.

“Minerals? Shit!” he snorted, his long face breaking into a grin. Then he glanced at Margaret. “Excuse me, honey.”

Kepler said, “God bless you.” To Margaret he said, “Must be something he ate.”

Immelmann leaned forward, talking barely above the buzz of noise around them. “It’s not oil, it’s not minerals, it’s”—he glanced about and pronounced distinctly—“beefalo.”

“Beefalo?” Chinese Gordon asked.

“That’s right. Beefalo are a hybrid animal that has been developed by crossing beef cattle and buffalo. The meat tastes just like beef, but the animals themselves thrive in the roughest climate. I’ve been looking into this, and Saskatchewan is perfect. Way up north where cattle can’t live and land is cheap.”

Chinese Gordon stared at Margaret. She looked down at her hands in her lap.

Kepler leaned forward and said, “Immelmann, you are a grown man. When somebody tells you something tastes just like something else, you ought to know better than to believe him. You’ve been through survival school in the Marines, haven’t you?”

“Sure.”

“They told you snake tasted just like chicken, didn’t they? Well, you know goddamn well it doesn’t. It tastes like snake. Armadillo doesn’t taste like—”

“That’s true,” said Immelmann. “It’s not like that. Everything disgusting is supposed to taste like chicken. If they said beefalo tasted like chicken, I’d know they were lying. It doesn’t. It tastes like beef.”

“That’s what they say about horse, too,” Kepler said. “You ever eat horse?”

Margaret looked up to see the heavily padded bust of the waitress appear between her and Kepler. The conversation was beginning to make her queasy, but maybe the drink would help.

Immelmann was insistent. “Look, at this moment the world is starving for beef.”

The waitress eyed him uneasily. “Would you like to order something to eat?”

Kepler shook his head and handed her a bill.

Chinese Gordon sang, “I see by your outfit that you are a beefalo boy.” Immelmann stared at him, one eyebrow lifted, so he moved on into “I’m an old beefalohand,” which he changed quickly to “Beefalo gals won’t you come out tonight and dance in Saskatoon.”

“You’re not a normal person, Chinese,” Immelmann announced. “I’m offering you a chance to quietly convert your assets, which are a little precarious, if you know what I mean, into substantial holdings in land and stock.”

“You know,” said Kepler, “if you just took it to Las Vegas and played blackjack you’d have a little less than a fifty-fifty chance of making more.”

“Is that what you’re going to do?” asked Margaret.

“I’m not doing anything except drinking up some of the interest until I hear what you two have to say,” Kepler said. “Chinese told me how to get it. Maybe I’ll let him tell me what to do with it.”

“I don’t think we’re going to need much money for this,” said Chinese Gordon. “I just don’t want to see you sink into inactivity, moral degeneration, and premature senility.”

“Not more night classes?”

“I’m thinking about it. By the way, Immelmann, if you moved to a ranch in Canada you’d be able to take that big mutant—”

“Chinese!” said Margaret.

“Right. Yeah. It’s an idea Margaret had, and we wanted to see what you thought.” He leaned forward and spoke quietly. “All that paper I got Sunday night turned out to be some stuff the professor was doing for the CIA. Most of it’s kind of long winded, but there’s enough of it that’s readable to make pretty good headlines.”

“Blackmail them?” said Immelmann. “And you’re afraid of a dog?”

“It has certain advantages. Secrecy is their middle name.”

“No,” Immelmann interrupted. “Intelligence is their middle name.”

Kepler held up his hand. “I get it. I see what you’re saying. They’d be more worried than anybody about keeping things secret. And because they’re secret, they can pay off.”

“That’s what we were thinking,” Chinese Gordon said. “If you try to hold up the mayor of Los Angeles, he can’t pay even if he wants to because he—”

“They’ll just kill us all,” Kepler said. “Until now I was wondering who took that professor out.”

“That just proves our point,” said Margaret. “What we’ve got is important enough to be worth something to them.”

“Get rid of it, then,” Immelmann said. “Pretend you never saw it, Sunshine. Free yourself of this maniac and come with me to the land of the midnight sun.”

“Isn’t that Sweden?” Margaret asked.

“Who cares?”

“Shut up,” Kepler said. “It is an interesting idea. Is the paper good enough to work with?”

“Within limits,” Chinese Gordon said. “I figure if we don’t ask much more than it would cost to hunt us down, we might have a deal.”

“What price range, roughly?” Kepler asked.

Margaret said, “I read in the paper it costs about five million dollars each time the President spends a weekend in Los Angeles, with the security and servants and things.”

“I’d say in the ten-to-twenty range,” said Chinese Gordon, holding his drink up to the light as though he were scrutinizing it for impurities. “No sense in pricing yourself out of the market.”

“Let’s go over to the shop and do some reading,” said Kepler, tossing a sheaf of bills on the table.

They all stood up and began moving through the crowd. Margaret turned to Immelmann and whispered, “I thought you weren’t interested.”

He leaned down and answered, “First they’ll get you, but it won’t matter because your birth certificate has already disappeared so you don’t exist. But then there may be people like me who think they might remember there was such a person. Only they couldn’t be right, because pretty soon their birth certificate disappears and they don’t exist either.”

Margaret edged past a man who seemed to be wearing the skin of a woolly animal as a vest. “I suppose you think what you’re saying makes sense?”

“No, I just think I’d better come along in case you need somebody tall.”

“Tall?”

“Pretty soon you’re going to be in deep trouble.”

16

Utilization of Latent Terror Research and Analysis. 825074. The current phase of ULTRA is perhaps the most ambitious attempt to test the application of modern techniques of directed psychophobic behaviors. By implementing a plan developed by the Central Intelligence Special Operations Division, it will be, for the first time, possible to test with classic empirical methodology the validity of the psychometric predictions developed in the early phases of the ULTRA project.

Background: In 1978 the government of Mexico released previously secret geological reports concerning the Chicontepe Field, a strip of land seventy-five miles long and seventeen miles wide along the Gulf of Mexico between Tampico and Poza Rica. This area, it was revealed, contains potential petroleum reserves double the size of those on the Arabian peninsula. Because of the obvious economic and strategic importance of this Chicontepe Field, the Central Intelligence Agency was asked to develop tactical proposals for securing it.

Porterfield tossed the sheet on the table and rubbed his eyes. “This Professor Donahue had clearance to be given a contingency plan for the takeover of Mexico?”

The Deputy Director raised his eyebrows and shrugged, a gesture he might have practiced before a mirror. He was able to do it without disturbing the expertly fitted shoulders of the blue banker’s suit. “As nearly as I can tell, he helped develop at least two alternative plans for that objective. He seems to have been in on the ground floor, and the clearances grew up around him and his research.”

“Did Morrison know about these Mexico plans? Was he cleared?”

“I doubt it. At least not beyond the theoretical stage.”

Porterfield froze, his hands still over his eyes. Slowly he opened his fingers and peered between them at the Deputy Director, his eyes cold and alert.

The Deputy Director sat in silence. He glanced around the room as though he’d never noticed it before, and was impressed. Then his eyes settled on Porterfield and widened in a pantomime of meeting an old friend far from home. “Of course there are plans, Ben. There are always plans, you know that. There are plans for everything.”

Porterfield nodded, his hands folded now in front of his mouth.

“When I left my job with the brokerage to come here, do you know what the Mexico plans looked like? One of them was actually based on Woodrow Wilson’s landing of marines at Veracruz. I guess they figured, ‘Hell, it worked once.’” He chuckled.

Porterfield leaned forward. “So you and the Director decided—”

The Deputy Director held his hands out in a gesture of modesty. “Not me, Ben. I was just one of many people who suggested that the Company had better get moving or some fine morning the only option we’d have would be to let the Russians take over the biggest oil field in the Western Hemisphere or blow seventy-five miles of Mexican coastline into the Gulf.” He tapped the table with his forefinger. “You’ve got to remember what the situation has always been down there. In 1961, when everybody else broke off relations with Cuba, Mexico didn’t.”

“Okay,” said Porterfield. “Now the plan, or enough of it, is in the hands of foreign terrorists, and has been for a couple of days now. It’s blown. Now what?”

“That’s what the Director wants you to tell him. It’s a fumble, Ben. I’m not denying that. We’re on our own fifteen-yard line, and this Professor Donahue fumbled the ball. It’s up to you to pick up the ball and do whatever you can with it.”

“What arrangements have been made for getting people out who might be compromised?”

“A couple of the division chiefs seem to have panicked and begun rolling up their own networks, but we’ve countermanded the orders. We’ve even met a few of these nervous Nellies at airports and turned them around.”

“Why?”

The Deputy Director smiled. “Why?” he shook his head, still smiling. “Hell, you’re an old hand, Ben. You spent a lot of years moving in and out of those Latin American countries, and you never ran out on an assignment. If we pulled out everybody who was afraid of Professor Donahue’s reports, we’d lose half our people in five or six countries. And where do you stop? Most of our operatives down there aren’t even Americans. Do you pull them out too? If we even hint that these papers exist, a lot of them will convict themselves by trying to run away.”

“Pull them out.”

“What?”

Porterfield said, “Pull them out. If the report turns up, you can send them all back, or most of them. But it’s been long enough now that we know we probably won’t get the papers in any of the easy ways.”

“We can’t do that, Ben. It’s the one thing we can’t do. It would take years to get back to the point we’ve already reached.”

Porterfield’s hand moved across the table and cradled the Deputy Director’s necktie, his thumb rubbing the smooth-textured silk as though he were considering buying it. He said quietly, “You and the Director are morons. In a way you’re a lot like the late Professor Donahue.”

“You’re way out of line, Porterfield,” said the Deputy Director. He sat limp in his chair, motionless and sweating.

Porterfield’s hard eyes held him. “You’ve been thinking about contingency plans and strategic objectives. Now I’d like you to think about what happens if these papers are sitting right now in the office of, say, the chief of internal security in Buenos Aires or Mexico City or Santiago. I’ve seen what happens when they roll up a network. Only this time it’ll be different. You’d better be rooting for them. The death squads and the secret police are usually pretty good because they get so much practice, but they always miss a few.”

The Deputy Director jumped to his feet, but Porterfield’s grip on the necktie tightened, and the Deputy Director jerked to a stop halfway up, giving an involuntary grunt, his eyes watering. Porterfield loosed his grip, and the Deputy Director straightened.

“Since you like the tie so much, I’ll have my tailor send you one just like it next week.”

“No, thanks. By then it might be bad luck.”

“R
EAD THE SECTION
on the Mexico project,” said Margaret. “We haven’t gotten through it yet, but that looks like it could be the best.”

Kepler leafed through the report, holding it far from his face and eyeing it warily. “Here. Tactics. That’s at least something I can read.”

It is essential to link the government in the minds of the populace with the privileged upper classes and to create a deep and inflexible hostility to both. At the same time, it is important to ensure that the government will be stimulated to react to each crisis by turning its power against the suspect lower classes. For Phase One of the program, the most useful vehicle is the Ministry of Health. For the past ten years the Ministry of Health has been engaged in a concerted effort to promote family hygiene in every way possible: vaccination, the draining of swampy areas, etc….

“This is boring,” Kepler said. He skipped a few pages and started to read again.

Particularly effective are those products which are vigorously promoted by the Ministry of Health and sold in modern chain stores wholly owned by members of the ruling upper classes. Typical examples are contaminated baby food and toxic tampons.

“What?” said Margaret.

“You heard right.”

“I wish I hadn’t.”

“It’s pretty sickening stuff, all right,” said Kepler. “But it just isn’t what we need.”

“What on earth do we need?”

Immelmann spoke. “This is just enough to get us killed. It gets published and what happens? They deny it and it sinks out of sight. What we need isn’t something that gives them a week of bad press. We’ve got to find something that’ll keep them awake at night in a cold sweat.”

“Isn’t an invasion of a friendly country enough for that?” Margaret asked.

“No,” said Kepler. “I’m sure they have plans like this for every country on earth, and Antarctica. This isn’t worth anything unless they’re actually doing it, and they’re not.”

Chinese Gordon said, “There’s some of what you’re looking for on page 435.”

Kepler turned some sheets and read. “‘The assistant to the Minister’s appointment secretary would be responsible for ensuring that the Minister’s answer was the appropriate one of the four she had memorized.’” He skipped onward. “‘The chief of police of the village of Caliente would…’ You’re right, Chinese. This is the stuff—agents in place who can be identified.”

C
HINESE
G
ORDON HEARD A SCRATCHING SOUND
in the kitchen and turned his head to see Doctor Henry Metzger burying his food bowl with the throw rug, an elaborate and ostentatious performance that ended in his pretending to bury the rug too with an immense mound of imaginary material, interrupting his work occasionally to stare at Chinese Gordon.

“I’m busy, Doctor Henry. I’ll feed you later.”

Doctor Henry Metzger sauntered into the bedroom, rubbing his side against Margaret’s leg and then making a wide circuit along the wall. He passed behind the men and then sprang to the bed, padded across the sheets of paper and onto Margaret’s lap, where he walked in a tiny circle until his own tail brushed his face and he flopped down heavily.

It was then that they heard the sound downstairs. It was a hissing noise, a steady scrape as though someone were dragging something along the concrete floor. Then it seemed to be moving up the stairs, first only the hiss, but then a tapping began, something hitting on each step as it approached.

“It can’t be,” said Chinese Gordon.

At the sound of his voice the noise quickened, the staccato tap becoming a clatter.

“Too fast for a cop with a wooden leg,” said Kepler.

The dog’s big black muzzle appeared in the doorway. When he saw the gathering in the bedroom, his eyes seemed to flare with pleasure and his jaw hung open to let his tongue dangle out between the terrible white teeth. His breaths came in gruff, excited gasps, “Heh. Heh. Heh.” He seemed unconscious of his tail slapping the door as it wagged.

Kepler turned to Immelmann. “He must have heard you had some beefaloes.” His hand moved slowly to his right boot.

Doctor Henry Metzger lifted his head from Margaret’s lap a half inch and opened his eyes, then closed them again, purring.

“He was tied up outside with a double half hitch on a rope that would hold an aircraft carrier to a dock,” said Chinese Gordon.

The dog moved into the room, his long toenails scratching on the floor, a thick rope tied to his collar and stretching around the corner toward the stairway.

“You tied that thing up outside?” said Kepler. “What if he got hungry and ate a mailman or a kindergarten class or something? The least you could do is tie a decent knot.”

“Don’t be mad at him,” Margaret said. “He was just lonely for Doctor Henry Metzger and heard voices.”

“Looks like he chewed through the rope, Chinese,” Immelmann said.

“Yeah, and maybe you brought a monkey with you to untie it for him. Are you people deaf? He just dragged a four-inch ring bolt and probably half my garage wall up those stairs.”

“Just proves my point,” said Kepler. “No sane man leaves an animal like that outside, tied up or not.”

“No sane man has an animal like that,” Chinese Gordon snapped, “if there
is
another animal like that. And if he had one, you bet he’d let him go outside. Have you ever seen how much that dog eats? Well, he does everything else proportionately.”

“Awesome,” Immelmann agreed.

The dog walked up to Margaret and pushed his face close to Doctor Henry Metzger, who was now engaged in licking one of his paws. He placed the other on the dog’s nose.

“Don’t worry, Chinese,” said Kepler. “Chances are if he eats a kid he’ll probably eat his bicycle too, so there won’t be any evidence. Now unless you want to bring in a few poisonous snakes first, or a crocodile, I suggest we get back to business.”

With some difficulty Chinese Gordon moved his eyes to Kepler, but every few seconds Chinese Gordon glanced at the dog. “Okay. The papers and television people keep saying that we’re terrorists. That poor scared parking guy at the university gave them a description of us that leaves it open whether we’re black or white. I guess he’s afraid of dark people and afraid of us, so—”

“I read that you might be a new Samoan independence group,” Margaret said.

“I get the idea,” said Immelmann. “Who should we be? We can send them a ransom note in Korean. I’ve got a girl who writes Korean and it looks great. It looks like O, I, and L all printed sideways and backwards, upside down, and on top of each other—”

“Save it,” said Chinese Gordon. “We don’t want to do that. If we do, your friend will know.”

“No,” Immelmann said. “You see, we give her a long thing to translate and just pick out the words we want, one here, one there.”

“And then the answer comes back in Korean,” Kepler said. “Brilliant. Chinese is right. They think we’re terrorists, which means they think we’re nuts, which is good. They don’t know where we’re from, which is also good. If they think we’re from someplace in particular, they’ll start thinking about what they have to lose in that place, and maybe they’re not willing to take the chance by giving us money.”

“The less they have to work with, the better,” Chinese Gordon said.

The dog turned away from Margaret and walked toward Chinese Gordon. On the stairs there was a bump-bump-bump as the rope pulled its unseen burden three steps higher. “Damn,” said Chinese Gordon quietly. “Damn.” The dog placed its forepaws across Chinese Gordon’s legs and pushed off the ground. “Oh, God,” Chinese Gordon said, and the dog gave a strange low growl as it pushed its nose close to Chinese Gordon’s throat.

“Isn’t that sweet?” said Margaret. “He wants to sit on your lap, just like Doctor Henry Metzger.” Sadly she added, “He’s just too big.”

“Margaret,” said Chinese Gordon in a calm, quiet tone, “this noble animal is preparing to tear my head off.” The dog’s jaws were clamped shut, but he could see the two front fangs barely obscured by the black lips.

The dog gave another long, low growl. This time it seemed to start somewhere deep in his massive chest and move upward to his throat.