The Falcon and the Snowman (29 page)

Red lights went on behind Daulton, and this time he stopped. He stumbled out of the car and asked the officers why they had stopped him.

“May I see your driver's license, please?” the officer asked.

Under the glare of the patrol car's headlights, the deputies ordered Daulton to stand on one leg. He elevated one foot several inches off the ground, held it steady for a moment, and fell down on the pavement.

When they asked him to touch his nose with his right index finger, Daulton extended his arm, steadied himself, took aim and coaxed the finger to his face. But instead of finding his nose, Daulton stabbed an eye.

“Where do you think you are?” the deputies asked Daulton.

His slurred voice replied with a location in Redondo Beach, fifteen miles away.

After leaving Chris's home near the TRW plant earlier in the evening, Daulton, somehow, had survived a fifteen-mile drunken odyssey to Long Beach.

Chris had embarked that night for Ensenada, in Mexico, and a weekend of falcon-spotting with Gene Norman; he still had no love for Norman, but the job threw them together, and they had planned the trip over lunch one day at The Hangar. When Norman arrived early in the evening to pick him up, he found Chris and Daulton, drunk. There were long strips of recently developed film drooping like black ribbons from the counter tops and cupboards in the kitchen. Chris was sober enough to recognize the danger of discovery by Norman, and steered him away from the kitchen. Although Norman caught a glimpse of the black ribbons, if he was puzzled by them he said nothing about it to Chris.

Daulton and Gene had met once before at a party, and they hadn't hit it off. Gene had written off Daulton as a boisterous braggart, and Daulton thought Gene was a smart-ass who thought he was still in the Marines. That evening did little to help the fragile relationship. After Norman drove to Chris's house and walked inside, Chris gave him a beer, and before long a dispute erupted between Daulton and Norman over something one of them said. Daulton grabbed the can of beer; there was a scuffle and pushing. But Daulton was too drunk to continue the combat, and he went to his car and passed out. When he woke up, Chris and Norman had left for Mexico, and he ended up arrested for drunken driving. He was released on bail two days later.

Daulton had plans to make one big score and then move to Costa Rica. His brother had found out that the Golden Cove Deli had been sold, but Daulton now had a grander scheme in mind—a deal that could turn a few thousand dollars into a million and allow him to invest the proceeds in a business and retire, fish and relax in the sun, pulling the strings on his business from a fine beach home in Costa Rica, just like Robert Vesco, the fugitive American multimillionaire who lived in the Central American country.

Daulton's scheme was to buy a large quantity of drugs in Culiacán and turn it around on the streets of America. But he faced one major obstacle to realizing the plan: he didn't have the seed money to get the enterprise rolling. He had recently lost more than $10,000 he had fronted in a drug deal that was stolen in a rip-off, in addition to the $18,000 Granger still owed him. His own habit had chewed up a lot of his remaining capital, and with his incessant, extravagant spending, he didn't have much left. There was still some cash in Mexican banks, a few gold coins he had cached in a safe-deposit box and a few Oriental rugs. But he needed big money—$50,000 to $100,000 or more—to pull off this score.

His only hope was the Russians.

Daulton decided that if the scam could be carried on only a few more months, he could get the money he needed to begin his new life. Although Daulton sensed the Russians were growing colder to him, he was counting, as ever, on their addiction. There had been omens that summer that the Russians' patience with the diminutive huckster from Palos Verdes was wearing thin. But Daulton, as full of moxie as ever, was not deterred. Twice that summer, Boris failed to show up when meetings were scheduled—once, in August, leaving Daulton waiting an hour in a park after midnight.

The next day, Daulton went to Calzada Tacubaya, the overloaded expressway where the Soviet Embassy was located, and ignoring onlookers, pasted adhesive-tape X marks on lampposts on side streets that he knew embassy cars passed by frequently. The location wasn't on the list the Russians had given him, but he was anxious for a meeting; Chris had given him more KW-7 ciphers and more message traffic from the vault. And he had only $30 in his pockets.

Daulton was waiting at the Bali Restaurant that night, but Boris didn't show up, so Daulton decided on a second plan of action: he went to the embassy and, ignoring Boris' warnings to avoid the building, waited outside the gate for a car to pass, followed it in and persuaded a guard to find Boris.

Boris was outraged at the insubordinate agent.

“You're a fool,” he said, and told him again
never
to visit the embassy unannounced. Nevertheless, he accepted the delivery and, after disappearing into an adjacent office, returned with another envelope stuffed with American currency. In one way Daulton was right: the Russians were
still
addicted to the possibility of getting more secrets about American spy-satellite operations; moreover, Boris still wanted to meet Daulton's partner, the mysterious American who had access to the secrets. Daulton continued to play on the Russian's eagerness to meet Chris, promising that he would come to Mexico and using, as always, the promise of more to come. Daulton's welcome was wearing thin, but he felt he could still keep them on the hook.

32

Chris held the shiny automatic in his lap and wondered if he would have the guts to do it. Was this the way to end the nightmare, to kill Daulton? He had no regrets about his motive for the thrust against the insanities of the superpowers; he had acted, he told himself, on behalf of all the people who could no longer speak for themselves of the insanities—the victims of Ypres, Guadalcanal, Stalingrad, Dien Bien Phu, Khe Sanh and all the other graveyards of battle—but his protest had assumed a shape he had not imagined, and it had gone on too long.

He now wanted to survive.

He thought of Daulton's heroin-induced half-threat to blackmail his father and smiled bitterly to himself: his father would either shoot Daulton on the spot or handcuff him and get on the telephone to the FBI. No, he knew blackmail wasn't a problem; but if Daulton went to his father, Chris knew his own life would be ruined.

Daulton had evidence that linked Chris indisputably to spying for the Russians; somewhere, there were copies of the documents. Daulton had said he wanted to sell them a second time to the Chinese; as long as they existed, they would implicate Chris in espionage. Where were they? Daulton had said some were at his house, but others might be cached somewhere in Mexico. One evening after work Chris drove to Palos Verdes and slowed as he passed Daulton's house, weighing a plan to break in and ransack his room. But as he guided the Volkswagen past the sprawling house set back behind a big lawn, Chris realized there was no way he could pull it off; he remembered Daulton had told him his family had recently installed a burglar alarm connected to the Palos Verdes Estates Police Department.

The only way to end it without being caught, Chris decided, was to murder Daulton.

The best place for it, he thought, would be in the desert—a couple of shots from the automatic and the scavengers of the desert would take care of his body very efficiently. He looked down at the gun and outlined in his mind, step by step, how he would lure Daulton to the Mojave with a suggestion for an early-morning trapping expedition. He even rehearsed mentally the words he would say: “Come on, it's been a long time; let's go check out the old haunts.” He heard the shots and saw Daulton fall.

And then another vision flashed into his mind: he remembered the sight of Monsignor McCarthy saying Mass in the center of the altar at St. John Fisher, and the two of them, Daulton and himself, kneeling on each side of him.

The gray-haired priest genuflected, and his voice—a soft alloy of Ireland and Boston—resonated between the freshly painted walls of the new church:

Dominus vobiscum
. The Lord be with you.

And then he could hear their response in the Latin colloquy, two boyish voices, almost like distant chimes, replying as one:

Et cum spiritu tuo
. And with your spirit.

Chris recalled the two of them playing football, and in the wilderness, each placing his life literally in the hands of the other, as they explored eyries of falcons on a mountain ledge at the end of a rope, accompanied only by the sounds of rustling pines, the wind and a bubbling stream far beneath them.

He thought of the Daulton whom he had known before he became addicted to heroin. In a way, he knew they were alike. They had shared the same disillusionment over the infuriating gap between reality and the ideals they had been taught and the same repugnance for the hypocrisies of the Corporate State, as Charles Reich so eloquently called the country in
The Greening of America
.

Chris thought: Daulton fought against the system in the way in which he was most proficient, as a drug dealer, and before he soured beneath his addiction, he had challenged, along with Chris, hundreds of false assumptions about the corrupt world that had been bequeathed to them. But unfortunately, instead of using pot or hash or coke to enhance his perceptions of life periodically as his customers did, Daulton had let his euphoria sweep him away and it had become his reality, until he had no reality left. Once, Daulton had shared with Chris a contempt for the mindless flag-waving of the nationalists; he had been equally disillusioned. But by the spring of 1975, when all this had begun, Chris had known that the only way to get Daulton to carry out his plan was to appeal to his greed.

Heroin, Chris thought, had left Daulton a shell of what he had been. He was often sick physically now, and overwhelmed by the enormity of his rejection of a culture that gave him no peace; yet at the beginning it had seemed so small—peddling a few joints in high school. Stoned on smack, Daulton could forget and escape to his nirvana. Daulton, Chris thought, reminded him of comedian Lenny Bruce, who had also sought a solution in heroin for problems he couldn't solve. They were both sick, he decided, but their sickness stemmed from a sick society; both had banged their heads against established norms until their junkie obsession had left them with no basic morality. Their motivations were right, but they had destroyed their “selves” in the process.

Heroin had become Daulton's orgasm, Chris thought, and then appended a thought:
I suppose I have my own, my stooping falcons
.

Even if he did kill Daulton, even if he could, Chris finally decided, it wasn't a solution. Somewhere, copies of the documents were cached and they would haunt him no matter whether Daulton was alive or dead. Who knew whom else he might have told about them in a junkie fog? Chris thought once again of the vision of Daulton's small body crumbling from a fusillade of bullets and put the gun away in a dresser in his bedroom. All he could do, he decided, was let fate run its course.

“Can't I help you?” Alana asked in a voice that was part compassion, part frustration, part anger. “You never laugh anymore.” Alana was complaining increasingly of Chris's dark moods; she suspected that whatever was bedeviling Chris had something to do with his job and with Daulton, who seemed to materialize these days out of dark alleys at bizarre hours and, after a whispered conversation with Chris, disappear just as suddenly. But Chris, every time she brought up his moods and inexplicable behavior, refused to discuss whatever it was that was tormenting him. And so she groped unsuccessfully to define the forces that were causing the changes in Chris.

“I can't take it anymore,” she cried one night toward the end of August.

As she went on, Chris searched his mind for a course of action. And then he made a decision. Once again, he decided, he really had no choice. Chris felt as if he were riding a raft in the churning white water of the Colorado River, heading helplessly toward a precipice, a fall and disaster, and there was no place he could jump to a safe landing. Why, he asked himself, take someone with him on his inevitable trip to disaster?

As gently as he could, Chris lied to Alana that he did not love her anymore.

“You're wasting your time with me,” he said, feigning a good-natured expression of logic. He wasn't ready to make a commitment, he said; his life was too uncertain. “Lana,” he said, “I don't think our relationship is going any further than it is right now.”

Alana began to cry. She was shocked and hurt by his declaration. But she told Chris things couldn't continue as they had been. And in a painful way, she admitted to herself, she was relieved by the lessening of the maddening pressure brought into her life by Chris's descent into a dark cosmos that she couldn't see or comprehend.

After that night, talk of marriage ended, and Chris and Alana began to drift apart.

“Our relationship had been poisoned,” Chris would say more than a year later. “How can you marry someone with that kind of a situation? I had become a withdrawn, paranoid person; I lived behind a curtain; I had one life that was a normal aboveboard existence that I tried to make as wholesome as I could, and I had this poison gnawing away at me in this other life that I just totally put into a compartment and blocked off from everything else.”

In July, 1976, on the second anniversary of Chris's hiring at TRW, his supervisor made a notation in his personnel folder:

Chris has been a valuable employee in our communications section. His daily work is accomplished quite well. Chris has potential for future growth within Security providing he applies himself to seeking that goal.

After finishing his shift on September 3, 1976, a Friday, Chris drove his Volkswagen to the Los Angeles International Airport—it was less than two miles from the TRW complex—and bought a ticket to Mexico City.