Walking Back The Cat Read online

  "What's he talking about?" Finn asked.

  Parsifal laughed under his breath. "We have snared ourselves a rare bird," he said, "someone who in livelier days was referred to as a cold warrior." He circled Dewey and kicked him in the other shoulder. "My young friend and I are working our way up a ladder," he explained. "We started out on the lowest rung with your money-laundering friend Early. Early was kind enough to direct us to the second rung, the man in the green bow tie named Harry Lahr. Harry, in turn, led us to you. What we want to do is reach the top of the ladder. We want to see the world from the summit. We want to know the identity of the CEO of your mysterious consortium. We would also like to know the raison d'etre for the consortium. What does it do besides shake down Apache casinos and debrief Russian defectors?"

  "Smoking cigarettes is dangerous for your health," Dewey said. "Possessing this kind of information likewise is dangerous for your health. For your own safety, eventually for mine, it is out of the realm of possibility for me to respond to your questions."

  "You will respond to these questions, and to others," Parsifal promised. "You will rack your brain for details to convince me that you are not inventing the answers."

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  Dewey's thin lips stretched into a mirthless smile. "Va fa enculol"

  Parsifal produced Dewey's revolver from his waistband and hefted it in his palm. "If I am not mistaken, this is one of those elegant little French Lebels which were manufactured in the twenties and were still in service during the Second World War."

  "I see you are something of an expert on firearms," Dewey said with an unmistakable sneer.

  "I am an expert on people," Parsifal retorted. "I know how to make them talk. The Lebel —correct me if I am wrong—has a relatively weak muzzle velocity, but it makes up for this in reliability and accuracy. Where did you acquire it?"

  "This particular Lebel was given to me by my godfather, who ran a family property near Palermo in Sicily, on the occasion of my eighteenth birthday."

  Parsifal flicked the lever and snapped out the cylinder. He emptied the six bullets into the palm of his hand. Crouching in front of Dewey, he dropped five of the bullets on the ground and inserted the sixth into the cylinder. With a jerk of his wrist he snapped the cylinder back into the revolver, spun the chambers several times and cocked the pistol. Then he jammed the barrel deep into Dewey's mouth and pulled the trigger.

  The firing pin clicked against an empty chamber.

  Parsifal pulled the gun out of Dewey's mouth and thumbed back the hammer. "I didn't catch what you said. Would you repeat it? What is the name of the CEO who runs your consortium?"

  Blinking to clear tears from his eyes, Dewey breathed heavily through his nostrils, afraid to open his mouth.

  Behind Parsifal, Finn noted, "He's no good to us dead."

  Ignoring Finn, Parsifal told Dewey, "There is only one way for you to come out of this alive: by telling me what I want to know. Who was the Russian defector you were debriefing?"

  Dewey kept his mouth clamped shut and regarded Parsifal with fear and loathing.

  "What information did you get from her while you ate wedges of pizza and listened to arias on her tape recorder?"

  Dewey stopped blinking. "You must be the knight at the Round Table," he breathed. "You must be the Jew's Parsifal — "

  Walking Back the Cat

  Parsifal shoved the Lebel between Dewey's open lips and thrust it down his throat, causing him to gag. Then, with Dewey gaping up at him through wide-open eyes, he pulled the trigger.

  Again the firing pin clicked against an empty chamber.

  Parsifal pulled back the revolver. "Two down, four to go," he murmured.

  Finn came up behind Dewey. "You'd better answer his questions before he blows your brains out."

  Suddenly Finn detected a foul odor and retreated to the mouth of the grotto. Parsifal pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and covered his nose. "Egidio de Wey, alias Dewey, has lost control of his sphincter muscles," he announced. "From my point of view that is an auspicious sign. It means he is scared shitless, as they say. It means he may be ready to talk."

  Still breathing heavily through his nostrils, Dewey twisted his head away. Parsifal took a deep breath through his handkerchief, then, discarding it, reached over and pinched Dewey's nostrils between his fingers. Dewey's eyes bulged. When he could no longer hold out for lack of air, he opened his mouth and gasped. Parsifal thrust the Lebel down his throat again. "This one may be it," he said, and he pulled the trigger.

  The hollow click reverberated through the grotto.

  Settling back onto his haunches, Parsifal covered his mouth with the handkerchief. "Three down, three to go," he remarked through the folds.

  Dewey's eyes, blinking rapidly, burned into Parsifal's. Gradually the blinking slowed down, then stopped. Articulating very distinctly, he pronounced the words swan and song. Then he stared at Parsifal through eyes that were totally expressionless. Then he pitched forward and crashed, facedown, onto the chalky floor of the grotto.

  "Looks like he's fainted," Finn said.

  Parsifal balanced the Lebel on a knee and reached around to Dewey's neck, feeling for his pulse. "The son of a bitch," he muttered. Backing away, he shook his head in disgust. He fished the sixth bullet from his jacket pocket, where he had slipped it when he was trying to convince Dewey that he'd loaded the Lebel for Russian roulette. "The revolver was empty," he told Finn. "His heart gave out."

  Parsifal removed the electrical wire from Dewey's wrists, retrieved the five bullets from the ground and dropped the Lebel and the bullets into his pocket. He would wipe his fingerprints off the revolver and dispose of

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  it and the bullets far from the cave before the night was over. All that would be left when the first tourist gave the alarm in the morning would be the body of a man who had died of a heart attack.

  Backing out of the grotto, Parsifal squatted near the mouth of the cave and stared into the night. "Don't feel bad," he said when Finn joined him. "He wasn't a virgin when it comes to violence."

  "I don't feel bad," Finn said. "I don't feel."

  Parsifal glanced sideways at his companion, then snorted. To the south, over the constellation of Orion, a large star throbbed dull red. "Do you see that star?" Parsifal asked. "It's called Betelgeuse —it's what's known as a giant red. It is a dying star, so swollen in its death throes that you could fit our entire solar system into it. Death, whether of a star or a man, is a spectacle."

  Finn was following his own thoughts. "Without Dewey we're at a dead end. There's no way we can reach the last rung of the ladder."

  Parsifal stretched out a finger and traced two lines in the chalk dust at his feet.

  fairly ^ Green Bow Tie—>Dewey—^Egicho's M«ac?

  Parsifal >Le Tmf—-^|_a Gioconda—> Prince l<}or?

  Finn played his flashlight on the chalk dust. "Dewey called you Parsifal . . ."

  "I am a knight at King Arthur's Round Table in search of the Holy Grail." He arched his brows thoughtfully. "The two lines are connected in at least four places," he went on. "One: when our friend in the green bow tie, Harry Lahr, and Dewey wanted to get in touch with each other, they planted a marker message with the person known as Le Juif, who served as a cutout. Two: when Dewey finished debriefing his Russian lady defector for the consortium, he decided to wipe the trail clean, at which point it was Le Juif who brought me into the picture. Three: when Green Bow Tie heard that you had talked to Early, he must have gone whining to Dewey, who surely passed the complaint on up to his CEO. The CEO somehow sent instructions down the second line to Le Juif, who brought me in to eliminate you."

  "And number four?"

  Walking Back the Cat

  Parsifal nodded grimly. "Four is: how could Dewey know that I was the Jew's Parsifal unless the two lines were connected?"

  Parsifal reached down and extended the two li
nes until they met in a V. "It's as plain as Betelgeuse in the constellation of Orion," he told Finn. "Contrary to the conventional wisdom on the subject, parallel lines sometimes do meet."

  Walking Back the Cat

  Pilgrim laughed. "We're in the holy of holies, Room SH219 in the Hart Office Building. It's where members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence listen to half-truths from the CIA's mandarins. When my congressman, who is vice chairman of this committee, is busy getting his white ass reelected, which is ninety percent of the time he's awake, I sit in for him."

  "You have access to CIA secrets?"

  "You asked me that when you called. It wasn't something I could answer on the phone. But I'll answer it now: within limits, yes, I have access to CIA secrets." He nodded toward the computer on the table, toward the bank of colored telephones lined up on a side table. "The red one is a direct line to Langley. Some congressmen use it to get the latest stock market report. So what's up? You in some kind of jam?"

  Finn took a deep breath. "What's up is a guy tried to kill me. He stopped at the last second because he wasn't sure who wanted me dead. Me and this guy, we're . . . walking back the cat. We're trying to find out who wants me out of the way."

  Pilgrim was intrigued. "Walking back the cat is CIA-speak. Which means the guy who tried to kill you comes from the wide world of spooks. Aside from that, you're not giving me much to nibble on."

  "Yeah. So what we discovered so far is a nest of former CIA types working out of New Mexico under the cover of something they call the consortium. I thought maybe if I gave you names, you'd give me ranks and serial numbers."

  Pilgrim scratched at his beard. "Let's take a shot at it."

  "There's a joker name of G. D. Early. He used to work for something called the Defense Intelligence Agency. On the side he laundered money for another something called Special Projects over at the CIA. Then there's another joker from Special Projects, name of Harry Lahr, who talked Early into retiring from Defense Intelligence and going to work for the consortium being set up in New Mexico. The consortium is compart-mented the way a submarine is compartmented. Early reports to Harry Lahr. Lahr reports to someone named Dewey, who was his boss at Special Projects until he quit to join the consortium."

  "Is Dewey a first name or a last name?"

  "It's a code name. His real name is Egidio de Wey. The Dewey comes from de Wey. Dewey reports to someone at the top rung of the consortium ladder, but we don't know who that is."

  Robert Littell

  "Why don't you ask Dewey?"

  "We did. He died of a heart attack before he could answer."

  Pilgrim didn't bat an eye. "What does this consortium do?"

  "That's something else we don't know. It shakes down an Apache casino for operating funds, but that has to be a sideline. The only other thing we know about it is that Dewey, acting presumably for the consortium, debriefed a Russian defector."

  Pilgrim finally raised an eyebrow. "Come again?"

  Finn said, "There was a woman stashed in an apartment in Dallas. Dewey used to bring her pizza and an attache case filled with twenty-dollar bills from the Apache casino. The reason we know the money came from the Apache casino is that the bills were folded down the spines."

  Pilgrim scraped his chair closer to Finn's. "A woman was shot to death in Dallas not long ago with an eleven-millimeter bullet fired from a handgun that could only have come from another country and another century. The fillings in the victim's teeth, the watch on her wrist, all came from Russia. The FBI did a routine check on her and discovered she'd been a middle level pencil pusher in the KGB when there still was a KGB and it still had pencils; she was an assistant to the assistant, that kind of thing. The CIA swore on the usual stack of Bibles that they didn't know she was in America, didn't even know she had defected. None of the other intelligence agencies admits to giving her the time of day. The FBI is still tripping over its shoelaces trying to figure out how she got to Dallas, and what secrets she could have given to the person or persons who brought her over in exchange for bringing her over. And now you pop up in DC and tell me she was being debriefed by someone named de Wey, alias Dewey, who used to run a unit called Special Projects for the CIA."

  Finn grinned. "Yeah."

  Pilgrim swiveled the computer screen around until he could see his reflection in it, then lit it off. The screen blinked through a series of automatic checks, then asked for an identifying number. Pilgrim typed something in on the keyboard that didn't appear on the screen. Apparently satisfied, the computer flashed, "Thank you. Wait one. Going online with computer central," then offered up the time, date and a menu. Pilgrim moved the cursor to "Biography (Short)," and hit Enter. "The first name you mentioned was G. D. Early," he remembered. He typed in the name and clicked Enter again. A moment later a paragraph materialized on the screen.

  Walking Back the Cat

  "Early, Gregory Dorman, bn. April 14, 1943. B.S. in biology, Alfred University, Alfred, NY, 1964. 1965-69: U.S. Army Intelligence stationed in Saigon, Phnom Penh and Taiwan. 1969-77: Resident Treasury Dept. Deputy Chief of Station, Thailand, with responsibilities for running Treasury agents in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam. 1977-92: Treasury Dept., Washington, with expertise on drug and arms smuggling and money laundering operations. 1992: Contract terminated at his own request."

  Finn, reading over Pilgrim's shoulder, said, "Try Harry Lahr."

  "Lahr, Harold, no middle name, bn. October 10, 1949. B.A. in economics, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, 1970. 1970: Commissioned Ensign USNR after completing four-month Officer Candidate School, Newport, RI 1970-74: Communications Officer aboard USS John R. Pierce (DD753). 1974-75: Traveling Southeast Asia. 1975-79: U.S. Naval Intelligence contract employee based in Thailand, responsible for liaison with Treasury Dept. agents operating in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam. 1979: Applied to CIA, vetted, accepted. 1979-92: Central Intelligence Agency contract employee, involved in domestic collection, counterterrorism, assistant to the deputy chief of staff for HUMINT tasking. 1992: Separated at own request."

  "They left out Special Projects," Finn noted.

  Pilgrim backtracked to the menu and called up the CIA organizational chart. He typed in "Special Projects" and hit Enter. The computer screen went blank for a long moment before printing appeared: "Special Projects is a subunit under the Deputy Director for Science and Technology. It is headed by an A7 and has a staff of twenty-eight. It produces and tests state-of-the-art espionage equipment for eventual use by the Directorate of Operations under field conditions."

  "That doesn't sound like what Dewey's Special Projects was doing," Finn said. "It was more along the lines of dealing with the Mafia and laundering money. Early said Harry Lahr called him in to freelance for Special Projects when they had to slip a bundle of bucks to foreign leaders."

  "That smells like smoke from the Directorate for Operations," Pilgrim remarked. He punched in "Special Projects" and specified "Directorate for Operations." The answer came back instantly: "There is no record of a Special Projects unit operating under the aegis of the Directorate for Operations."

  "If there was no Special Projects, what did de Wey, alias Dewey, do for a living?" Finn asked.

  Robert Littell

  "Let's take a look-see at the gospel according to the CIA/' Pilgrim said. He scrolled back to the menu and called up "Biography (Short)" again, then punched in "de Wey." The computer brought up a paragraph.

  "de Wey, Egidio Fabio, bn. 1935 in Palermo, Sicily. 1946: Immigrated with parents to America. 1955: Naturalized U.S. citizenship. B.A. in comparative literature, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, 1956; M.A. in medieval history, Cornell University, 1958. 1958-62: Associate professor, medieval history, CCNY, New York, NY, 1962: Recruited to CIA on CIA initiative, known by operational name of Dewey. 1963-69: Deputy chief of station, Rome. 1969-80: Worked in various departments of Directorate for Operations, Washington (Counterintelligence, Counter-narcotics). 1980-92: Italian desk, officer in charge of lia
ison with Italian-source assets, domestic and foreign. 1987: Granted a six-month sabbatical after minor cardiac attack. 1992: Separated at own request. January 1994: Drowned in boating accident off Florida Keys (see Cleveland, Rudge)."

  Finn whistled under his breath. "Dewey didn't drown in any boating accident."

  Pilgrim said, "The plot thickens. 'Liaison with Italian-source assets, domestic and foreign' means de Wey, alias Dewey, was the CIA's point man with the Mafia at a time when the CIA wasn't admitting it had contacts with the Mafia. Then there is the little problem of how he could debrief the Russian pencil pusher in Dallas if he drowned in a boating accident the previous winter. Not to mention how he could die of a heart attack when you questioned him if he was already dead."

  Pilgrim turned back to the keyboard, typed in "Cleveland, Rudge" and hit Enter.

  "Cleveland, Rudge Blaine, bn. 1939. B.A. in Russian literature, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 1960; M.A. in Russian history, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1962; Ph.D. in Soviet studies, Yale University, 1966. 1966: Recruited to CIA on CIA initiative. 1966-67: Russian-language school. 1967-68: Posted to Soviet Division, Washington. Assistant to the deputy chief of Soviet desk. 1968-71: Posted to Moscow Station. 1971-73: Deputy chief of Soviet desk, Washington. 1973-77: Moscow chief of station. 1977-80: Chief of Soviet desk, Washington. 1980-85: Assistant to deputy director for operations (ADDO), Washington. 1985-92: deputy director for operations (DDO), Washington. December 1992, took early retirement option at the request of director, Central Intelligence (DCI). January 1994: Drowned when his sloop was

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  caught in a storm off the Florida Keys (along with retired CIA colleague de Wey, Egidio; see de Wey, Egidio, alias Dewey)."

  Pilgrim snickered. "It's not every day that one of the CIA's Medicis ups and drowns in a boating accident."

  Finn grabbed his arm. "What did you say?"

  "The CIA doesn't lose many of its top people in boating accidents — "

  "Before that. You said something about one of the CIA's Medicis."