Walking Back The Cat Read online

  "You figuring on being there?"

  "My agent friend says three's a crowd."

  "Ten tomorrow. At the yucca rope factory. Right."

  "Right as rain."

  Robert Littell

  Finn stretched out on the pickup seat. He was wearing dirty sneakers. Shenandoah eyed them trying to figure out how she could get him to take his sneakers off her new seat covers without hurting his feelings.

  Somewhere in the woods a coyote yowled at the half moon threading through lace-thin clouds. "And this heaven that Wakantanka created," Finn asked after a while. "How do you see it in your imagination?"

  Shenandoah absently practiced a two-card push-off, repeating the sleight-of-hand gesture over and over. "The way I picture heaven, there's this big trunk at the entrance, the kind my father used to have in the back of his Chevy when he was crisscrossin' Texas lookin' for the ultimate poker game. I see my Indian name stenciled on the side of the trunk in faded red letters. Ish-kay-nay. In the trunk is everythin' I ever lost in my whole entire life: the raggedy doll with the Oriental eyes that actually shed tears if you remembered to fill the plastic bottle in her back, the silver ankle bracelet with the tiny silver buffalos, the yellow silk ribbons my mother used to twine into my braids, the Mamas and the Papas LP that I got on my tenth birthday, the red scarf my mother knitted me when I was twelve, the gold earrin' I lost at seven-card stud before I mastered the two-card push-off, the seven-speed bicycle my father won for me at poker but lost back the day after, my innocence the first time I climbed into the rack with a man." She checked her wristwatch and jumped to her feet. "I got to go. Casino opens in ten minutes. Hey, will you do me two personal favors, Saint Louis? One: don't keep that appointment at the rope factory. If I ever get to heaven, assumin' of course that I'm headin' for heaven, I don't want to find you in the goddamn trunk too."

  "What's the second favor?"

  "Take your goddamn sneakers off when you stretch out on my goddamn seat covers."

  Robert Littell

  out, he accepted the cigarette from Finn. "When an Apache dies," he continued, "he's buried with everything he owns. This is done to prevent his ghost from returning to retrieve his worldly possessions, which could bring what we call ghost sickness, and death, to the dead man's village. The wickiup in which the dead Apache lived is burned to the ground. The handful of relatives and close friends who attend the burial burn their clothes afterward, and then bathe in sage smoke to purify their bodies. They change their names and the names of their children so that they will no longer be called by the names the dead man used."

  "Why do we talk of death?" Finn wanted to know, but Eskeltsetle rambled on as if he hadn't interrupted.

  "Few outsiders understand Apaches. It is not so much that we turn our backs on death, it is more a matter of moving forward into life." Eskeltsetle came to the point. "You wanted my advice, here it is: you must keep the appointment at the rope factory, for it is only by meeting your destiny that you embrace life."

  Finn was not enthusiastic. "I came here looking for a backwater where I could rise above the demon."

  Eskeltsetle shook his head. "Your demon is never farther from you than your shadow." Then he closed his eyes and said something that startled Finn. "Your shadow darkens my door." The old Apache opened his eyes and raised his chin. "Us Apaches," he went on, cutting off Finn's question before he could ask it, "don't believe the world will last forever. We say that the rocks and the mountains will be around a long time, but even they will disappear. And when they have all gone—the rocks and the mountains and the Apaches and the white man—what will be left?"

  Eskeltsetle offered Finn a turn at the cigarette. "What will be left," he said softly, "are our deeds."

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  Robert Littell

  human form. If an FBI agent was going to meet him here, he sure was being discreet about it, he thought.

  Off to his right he made out a metal staircase spiraling up to a walkway that had been used to service the suspended machinery. Backing up the first few steps, Finn turned and climbed to the walkway, then made his way across it, all the while probing the shadows below him. At the far end of the hangar he stood with his back against the wall and listened. The building seemed to creak like a sailing ship. From somewhere below came a scraping sound —or had he imagined it? Staked out on perimeter patrol in the Gulf, Finn had spent a lifetime of nights staring at shadows until they took on human forms; once he had emptied the clip of an Ml 6 at what he took to be a bearded, turbaned monster of a man lurching toward him across the sand only to discover, when Lieutenant Pilgrim illuminated the area with a flare, that he had slaughtered a stray goat.

  Now, on the catwalk, he spotted the glint of a doorknob off to his left. He edged sideways and turned it. A door opened in the bulkhead. Removing the newspaper from his shotgun, fingering the trigger, resting the tip of the barrel on his right shoulder, he slipped through the door into what turned out to be a narrow corridor that ran the length of the factory. On both sides were cubicles that contained the paraphernalia of rope making—crates of chemicals, barrels of glues and lubricants, jars of dyes, spare parts for the machinery. In one cubicle, records and manifests spilled out of torn cartons piled up on the linoleum floor. In the dim light seeping through a paneless window, the mass of paper looked like shallow drifts of snow. Finn kicked at the paper, then wheeled back toward the corridor—and felt the business end of a very cold pistol pressing into his solar plexus. He heard a distinct click as the gun was cocked.

  "The weapon aimed at you," a shadowy figure instructed him in a bored voice, "is an 1880 Belgian pinfire pepperbox nine-millimeter revolver. It is a sweet shooting gun with almost no recoil. In its heyday the pepperbox was the last word in firearms, with a polished hammer and folding trigger and ebonized grips. The ammunition is difficult to come by, so I don't waste it on target practice. I only shoot to kill. If you remain absolutely motionless, it won't go off."

  Finn froze.

  "You must be Finn," the voice continued conversationally. The owner of the voice sniffed delicately at the air, like a dog memorizing the smell of a garment before tracking its owner.

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  "Don't know anyone named Finn," Finn said.

  Laughing under his breath, the shadow reached up and lightly fingered the silver earring in Finn's left lobe, then reached further back to touch the short ponytail.

  The fist holding the pistol never wavered. "You are Finn," the voice announced.

  "You wouldn't be FBI?" Finn asked hopefully.

  The shadow snickered playfully.

  "I didn't think you were," Finn said.

  The man holding the pistol removed the shotgun from Finn's hand. "Weapons can be dangerous for your health," he noted.

  Finn felt light-headed, as if he had been smoking some Kuwaiti hashish. The moment had the weightless quality of a dream sequence. "What happens now?" he asked. He thought he knew the answer: embracing life had brought him to the door of death.

  The figure in the shadows raised the shotgun until the barrel was inches from Finn's teeth. "What happens now," he announced in a voice devoid of tone, of texture, "is you commit suicide."

  A crooked smile deformed Finn's lips. He was frightened but not surprised; he had always been sure that death would catch up with him before love. Words over which he had no control surged like bile from the back of his throat. "You can go to hell," he told his executioner.

  "Teh tch," the shadow said. "No eto ne vremya iskat vragov"

  A vague memory stirred in Finn's brain. "You're talking Russian," he said huskily.

  Something in Finn's intonation caught Parsifal's attention. "How would you know it is Russian?"

  Instinctively Finn understood that conversation was a straw to clutch at. "I had a roommate in college who was Russian," he said quickly. "He used to talk Russian with his father on the phone. I recognize Russian when I hear it. I thought the person se
nt to kill me would talk Italian."

  Parsifal was intrigued. "Why Italian?"

  Finn could actually feel his heart pumping blood. "People who work for the Mafia are supposed to talk Italian, not Russian."

  With infinite slowness Parsifal retracted the barrel of the shotgun. "What makes you think I work for the Mafia?"

  Finn wasn't sure where the conversation was going—not that it mattered. "It's the Mafia that wants me out of the wav."

  Robert Littell

  "Why?"

  "Because of the casino. Because of Green Bow Tie."

  Finn could hear the executioner inhaling and exhaling as his eves searched the face of his victim. Finally Parsifal gestured with the shotgun toward a carton. "Sit."

  His thoughts racing incoherently, Finn backed up to the carton and settled down on it. It dawned on him that he had gotten a reprieve; how long it would last depended on his giving the right answers to the killer's questions.

  But which answers were the right answers?

  Parsifal sat down on a carton facing Finn. He rested the shotgun across his knees but kept the Belgium pepperbox pointed at Finn's chest. His gun arm never wavered. "Start at the start," he ordered. "Tell me about the casino. Tell me about Green Bow Tie."

  Finn said very slowly, "If you don't work for the Mafia, who do vou work for?"

  Parsifal raised the pepperbox until it was aimed directly between Finn's eyes; he was asking the questions, not answering them. Finn held up a hand, palm outward; he had gotten the message. "Eight months ago," he began, talking to save his life, hoping that what he was saying would mean something to the man sent to kill him, "the Suma Apaches opened a casino in Watershed Station. Someone named Dewey turned up in a shiny black Cadillac. He was eating a wedge of pizza and listening to opera on the car tape deck. He told the Apache keeping the casino books that he worked for an international organization with Sicilian roots. He said he would be sending around someone in a green bow tie now and then to skim off the cream — fifty thousand one night, a hundred thousand another."

  Finn went on to explain how one by one the Apaches who complained about the scheme had disappeared: Baychendaysan, the Long Nose, had vanished without a trace; Klosen, the Hair Rope, had been electrocuted while talking on the telephone during a thunderstorm; Uclenny, the Rapid Runner, had been found hanging from a rafter in a barn; Nahkahyen, the Keen Sighted, had died of a heart attack moments before keeping an appointment with a state prosecutor; the previous week, the casino bookkeeper, Tooahyaysay, the Strong Swimmer, had drowned in the Sacred Lake after telling Finn about the Mafia milking the casino. "And now you were about to" —Finn's mouth, suddenly chalk dry, could barely pronounce the words —"kill me."

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  Parsifal listened without interrupting. His eyes grew darker as the story unfolded. Seven and a half months before —executing his second assignment for the new Resident—he had killed an Indian with a prominent nose; he had forced his pickup off the road halfway down the S-curves a few miles out of New Jerusalem, had put a bullet between the driver's eyes, had chained a discarded radiator to the victim's ankle before throwing him off a cliff into a deep mountain lake fed by a needle-thin waterfall. Several months later he had orchestrated the death of another Indian so it would appear as if he had been electrocuted while talking on the phone during a thunderstorm. The suicide in the barn, the heart attack in Santa Fe, the drowning of the old Indian in the mountain lake — they had all been stamped with Parsifal's trademark: murders that went onto police blotters as suicides or accidental deaths. Parsifal had become curious at the batch of Indian victims; had even raised the subject with Le Juif after phoning him with word of the death of the young Indian in Santa Fe.

  "Have the people we work for declared war on the American Indians?" "Everything we do is a tiny piece that fits into a vast puzzle. Strive on." "That kind of answer went out of style with Joseph Stalin." "Beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a headache than a hole in the wall."

  For once Parsifal had been the one to sever the connection. And then there had been the intriguing matter of the man who went by the name of Dewey. Someone named Dewey—it could have been a first name or a surname —had debriefed the Russian woman barricaded in the small apartment in Dallas; had brought her pizza and crisply folded twenty-dollar bills and the tape of an opera to play while they talked shop. According to Finn, someone named Dewey had sat in a shiny black Cadillac outside the Apache casino eating a wedge of pizza and listening to an opera on the car stereo before shaking down the Apaches in the name of an international organization with Sicilian roots. Assuming, as seemed likely, that the two Deweys were one and the same man, what connection did the Russian woman barricaded in a Dallas apartment have with Apaches running a casino in the wilds of northern New Mexico? Had Le Juif sold out to the Mafia and knowingly become its agent? Had he been duped into taking orders from the Mafia in the mistaken belief that he was still working for a rejuvenated KGB? Was Parsifal redux nothing more than a Mafia hit man?

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  Robert Littell

  Parsifal remembered the conversation with Le Juif in the library reading room. "There is a cutout in place between me and the Resident," Le Juif had explained. "It is the woman with the code name of La Gioconda."

  Parsifal recalled having doubts. "How can you be sure the new Resident is genuine?"

  Le Juif, normally a meticulous handler of wetwork agents, had seemed so sure of himself. "La Gioconda conveyed his bona fides. She passed on an identifying cryptogram known only to me and our masters in Moscow Center."

  Was it within the realm of possibility that the Mafia had gotten its sticky hands on the identifying cryptogram?

  Parsifal shook his head; the idea was too far-fetched. "You are feeding me what Americans call a cock-and-bull story," he told Finn.

  "Every word is true," Finn whispered.

  Moving between shafts of moonlight, Parsifal crossed the room. In one easy motion he twirled the shotgun on the trigger guard and pressed the tip of the barrel into Finn's forehead.

  Finn closed his eyes and waited for the explosion to drown out the roar of the pulse pounding in his ears.

  Robert Littell

  Parsifal nodded. "The question intrigues me too. The Americans who work for the Central Intelligence Agency have an expression. When they go over an operation to see where it went wrong, they say they are walking back the cat. How about it, Mr. Finn? What do you say you and I pool our violence and walk back the cat together? What do you say we start at the start?"

  "There's this joker name of Frost has a line that stuck in my head — something about how the best way out is through. I say . . . let's do it."

  Robert Littell

  a U-turn, he headed slowly down the dirt road toward Santa Fe, twelve miles due north of Mary Magdalene's.

  The car's headlights skimmed across Finn's face. Parsifal studied his companion. He wondered if it had been smart to team up with him. It was never to late to correct a mistake.

  Ten minutes past midnight the silhouette of a stocky man materialized in the doorway of the whorehouse. Finn spit a sunflower seed out the window and leaned into the wheel. "That's him."

  Without a word Parsifal grabbed the old blanket that had been thrown over the torn vinyl seat, eased open the door, slipped out of the pickup and disappeared into the brush at the side of the road. On the porch of the house, the stocky man patted his pockets, came up with a lighter and a cigar and sucked the cigar into life. Behind him the screen door banged gently closed. A man could be heard reciting Hamlet's "To be or not to be" soliloquy in a drunken growl. A half-naked girl appeared at one of the second-floor windows and fanned her small pointed breasts with a magazine.

  Urinating at the side of the road, his legs spread wide, the stocky man waved his straw hat at her.

  "You-all come back real quick now, darlin'," the girl called down in a whiny child's voice. "Ah got
tricks up mah sleeve you-all never dreamed-a."

  "You do know how to gratify a client, Jo-Ellen, honey," the man declared. Whistling through his teeth, he produced car keys from a trouser pocket and started down the line of parked cars and pickups, trying to recall where he had abandoned his four-door Chrysler. Watching from the cabin of his pickup, Finn could make out the stocky man crouching and stabbing a key into a lock. Then he dropped from sight. Finn heard what sounded like a brief scuffle, then the muted rasp of someone gasping for air.

  "You-all being sick again, darlin'?" Jo-Ellen called in a disgruntled voice. Someone must have spoken to her inside the room because Finn could hear her say, "If a threesome'd tickle your fancy, darlin', ah don't mind a-toll," and she too disappeared from view.

  Moments later Finn heard a body being dragged along the side of the road, then something wrapped in a blanket was hefted into the back of the pickup. Parsifal drummed his knuckles on a rear fender. Finn gave him time to get back to the Chrysler, then released the emergency brake. The

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  Toyota coasted slowly down the dirt road. When it rounded a bend and Mary Magdalene's clapboard whorehouse dropped from sight, Finn jump-started the pickup, switched on the headlights and stepped on the gas. He glanced in the rearview mirror. The Chrysler was right behind him.

  Walking Back the Cat

  Finn remembered Shenandoah putting the same question to him a lifetime ago. "I do anything," he told Parsifal. "I wash dishes. I dig fence holes. I split logs. I pick lettuce."

  "You're wasting your talent," Parsifal said. "You ought to work for an intelligence agency."

  "Like you?" Finn asked, but Parsifal only flashed a tired smile that could have been taken either way; he wasn't ready to cross that Rubicon yet.

  It had been child's play to track Early down; everybody in New Jerusalem seemed to know where the editor of The Occasional Chronicle spent Tuesday and Friday evenings. After kidnapping him, they ditched his Chrysler behind a mountain of stone near an abandoned quarry off Route 14, north of Madrid, and drove north across the state to Watershed Station, arriving at three in the morning. Finn roused Eskeltsetle and explained the situation without going into detail: he and another guy had joined forces to abduct someone who held the secret of who was shaking down the casino. They needed a place to stash him while they questioned him.