Walking Back The Cat Page 9

  Finn strained to make out Parsifal's expression in the silvery darkness. "You were fighting for a lousy idea."

  "In the Gulf you were fighting for oil. That's a better idea?" Parsifal lifted a shoulder in a tired shrug. "I was one of those hybrids created by fifty years of cold war. If you look behind the woodwork, you can find them on either side of what we used to call the Iron Curtain. They wind us up, point us in the right direction and we blunder forward. It's the only thing we know how to do, so we do it. I was wound up sixteen years ago. I'm still blundering forward."

  Finn whistled through his teeth. "Jesus, am I in over my head!" Above the shack the moon drifted behind a cloud. "When you came to kill me, you thought the KGB had sent you, right?"

  Parsifal snickered into the darkness. "How did you put it— the best way out is through."

  "If you didn't kill me it's because you think someone besides the KGB wants me dead."

  Walking Back the Cat

  "Keep going."

  "If that's the case, if someone besides the KGB wants my hide, that means the people who wind you up and point you are being wound up, are being pointed —knowingly or unknowingly—by someone other than the KGB. Which brings us back to Early's consortium. Who or what is behind the consortium?"

  "The Mafia is the obvious front-runner," Parsifal said, thinking out loud. "But Early worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency, so that has to be another possibility. Green Bow Tie worked for something called Special Projects at the CIA. That's possibility number three."

  The moon reappeared from behind the cloud. Parsifal reached down and traced something in the dirt with the tip of a finger.

  Early > Green Boia/ Te. ^Dewey —> ?

  "We won't know where the buck stops until we've walked the cat back as far as it will go," he added.

  Finn asked, "Did you ever hear of an Apache called Baychendaysan, the Long Nose? Or Klosen, the Hair Rope? Or Uclenny, the Rapid Runner? Or Nahkahyen, the Keen Sighted? How about Tooahyaysay, the Strong Swimmer?"

  Parsifal glanced at Finn. "What makes you ask?"

  "A hunch."

  "They're all dead and buried and gone to Apache heaven, casualties of the Cold War."

  There was a flicker of headlights rounding a curve a mile up the dirt road. Parsifal took a deep breath and climbed to his feet. "What a coincidence," he said. "Here comes someone who can help us with our inquiries, as the British like to say." Casually he jammed a fifty-bullet clip into the Lanchester Mark 1 and worked the bolt, which locked into place with a muffled click. "This is a connoisseur's gun," he murmured as the headlights swung into the parking lot. "It was more or less handmade in 1940, before British industry went on a war footing and started mass-producing weapons, so the finish is high quality. You don't see many submachine guns with wooden stocks."

  Still crouching, Finn peered around the side of the shack. The headlights of what looked like a white jeep were trained on Early's Chrysler, which was parked behind a small mountain of stone. After a moment the

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  jeep's door swung open and the figure of a short muscular man appeared. "Early," a voice called. "You out there?"

  Finn turned to ask the Russian spy what they should do next, but he had disappeared into the night.

  In the clearing the driver of the jeep looked around nervously, then tugged a firearm from a shoulder holster and crouched behind the open door. "You playing games with me?" he called. He said, "Shit." Then he plunged back into the jeep, threw it into reverse and gunned the motor. At that instant Finn's pickup truck screamed around a rise and squealed to a stop thirty yards from the jeep, blocking the road. The pickup's headlights snapped on, illuminating the jeep. A shadow leaped from the pickup, ducked behind a barrel and emptied half a clip into the jeep's left rear tire.

  The jeep settled down like a wounded bird.

  "Your money or your life," Parsifal called with a savage laugh.

  "It's a fucking holdup!" the driver of the jeep shouted. "Early, where the fuck are you?"

  Parsifal emptied the other half of the clip into the back of the jeep. A flame licked at its underbelly, then began to spread as gasoline seeped onto the roadway.

  His weapon extended and gripped in both hands, the jeep's driver backed away from the flames spurting across the road. He looked around desperately, spotted the foreman's shack over his shoulder and, crouching, made a run for it.

  In the darkness he almost impaled himself on the barrel of Finn's shotgun.

  On the road, Parsifal, laughing wildly into the night, extinguished the flames with fistfuls of sand.

  "Who's your friend?" the driver of the jeep asked as Finn relieved him of his pistol.

  "When you find out, you'll wish you hadn't."

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  rung on the ladder—Early is one rung under you, Dewey is one rung above you. We want to climb the ladder."

  Harry's cut lips curled into a snarl. "You clowns got past Early, big deal. Don't let it swell your heads."

  Parsifal reached for his Lanchester Mark 1 and crushed the muzzle into Harry's forehead. Til blow you away if you don't tell me what I want to know. Who is Dewey? Is he a cutout between you and someone else? Who do you all work for? Who runs the consortium?"

  "Blow me away," Harry managed to mutter, "you blow away any possibility of getting answers to your questions."

  Parsifal retracted the Lanchester and studied the reddish ring the barrel had branded on Harry's forehead. "You're hard," he acknowledged, one professional complimenting another.

  "I been around," Harry replied huskily.

  "You haven't been around me."

  Parsifal set the Lanchester down against a wall. From a jacket pocket he produced a thick transparent plastic bag and two thick rubber bands. "I hope you have a strong stomach," he told Finn. "You'll need it."

  Finn leaned back against the wall. "Wherever you're going, I've been there."

  Parsifal glanced at Finn with interest. "I'll bet you have." He circled around behind Harry and deftly slipped the plastic bag over his head. "When you're ready to answer my questions," he instructed him, "all you have to do is open your fists."

  Inside the transparent bag, Harry's good eye darted in terror as Parsifal worked the two rubber bands over his head and down around his neck, sealing the plastic against the skin above his shirt collar and the green bow tie.

  Finn watched from the wall. If he felt any emotion, it didn't show on his face.

  Harry was using up the air in the sack with short frightened gasps; with each gasp the plastic came closer to sealing his mouth. "The folks who taught me this trick," Parsifal yelled into Harry's ear, "said there was enough air for roughly two minutes. After that you start to suffocate, a process that can last for another three or four minutes before you lose consciousness. You're going to drown, Harry, if you don't tell me what I want to know."

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  Parsifal kept his eyes on the hands taped together behind the ehair; the knuckles turned white as Harry strained to keep them clenched. Inside the sack, the vapor-coated plastic glued itself to his lips.

  "He had a point," Finn called across the room. "If he stops breathing, he'll have trouble answering your questions."

  Caught up in the contest of wills, Parsifal laughed wildly.

  Harry's head was jerking from side to side now as he struggled to suck in the last of the air in the sack. His open eye bulged in its socket, his shoulders shuddered. Then his fists sprang open behind his back.

  In one quick motion Parsifal hooked a finger over the rubber bands and yanked the plastic sack off his head.

  Harry sucked in a tremendous gulp of air, then a second. His chest heaved. Drained, his body slumped forward in the chair. When he was breathing more or less normally, Parsifal grabbed his chin and pulled his head back. "I'm ready if you are," he said. "Or do we cover your head with plastic again?"

  "What do you need to know?"

&n
bsp; "Let's start at the start. Who is Dewey?"

  Harry's voice was almost inaudible. "He was my lord and master at Special Projects."

  "What was Special Projects?"

  "It was a world within a world within a world." When Harry hesitated, Parsifal jerked his head back. "Okay, okay. On the surface it was an administrative vehicle for the odd project that needed a home phone, a mailing address. Special Projects had an office, it had a staff, it had a safe filled with one-time pads and laundered money."

  "What happened in the back rooms of this world within a world within a world?"

  "Dewey wheeled and dealed; he was the CIA's point man with the Mafia clans. Special Projects was the halfway house in which the two worlds, the CIA and the Mafia, came together to discuss matters of mutual interest."

  "Congress lets the CIA sleep with the Mafia?" Finn asked from the wall.

  "Congress doesn't know about it," Harry said. "Dewey ran the Mafia account out of his hip pocket so there'd be no paper trail if the congressional oversight dilettantes started dealing subpoenas to Company players."

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  Parsifal rustled the plastic bag next to Harry's ear. "So far you're only skimming the surface."

  Harry swallowed hard. "Dewey's real name, at least the one I know him by, is Egidio de Wey. De Wey is where the Dewey alias comes from. Egidio is Italian down to the spit-shined tips of his Milano shoes. He had contacts in Chicago, he had contacts in Reno, he knew the right people in Sicily, he was always yapping away in Italian with them on the phone. Office scuttlebutt had it that it was Egidio, fresh out of Yale, who talked the Mafia into trying to whack Castro back in the sixties. The in-house handle for Special Projects was Little Italy. If you phoned up and were put on hold, you got an earful of Pavarotti singing "La Donna" something or other."

  "Who did Egidio report to? Who supervised Special Projects?"

  "That wasn't the kind of information Egidio shared with me."

  "Okay, let's come at the problem from another direction. Give me an example of one of Special Projects' special projects."

  Harry's body appeared to grow smaller in the chair. "Egidio once organized a briefing for everyone connected with Russian ops. He projected a film produced by one of his freelance teams in a CIA screening room at Langley. Even Egidio's Medici turned up. When the lights went out, the door opened and he slipped in. In the dim light from the emergency exit sign over the door you could tell he was royalty; he had starched cuffs with cuff links that glowed in the dark, he had an entourage, he had a bodyguard, he had a girl Friday with long legs and a short skirt. The heads of sections, Dewey included, acted cool, but you knew they were turned on about him being there. The projectionist obviously'd been waiting for him to arrive to roll the film, which was Egidio's brainchild; it showed how Gorbachev was plotting to convince us the Cold War was ancient history so we would let down our guard. The Russkies couldn't beat us in the military hardware department so they were pulling a Trojan horse number—that was the name of the film, Trojan Horse II— and lulling us into disarming. From time to time, Egidio's Medici —he was sitting in the row behind Egidio threading these silver beads through his fingers, you could see the light glinting off them, you could hear the beads clicking against each other—the Medici would lean forward and jab Egidio in the shoulder and whisper something, and the two of them would laugh those loud laughs people who are very rich or very sure of themselves laugh."

  "What did Egidio's Medici look like?"

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  "He arrived after they turned the lights out. He left before they turned them on. Even in the dark he wore Ray-Bans."

  "He have a handle?"

  "Everyone has a handle, but I was too far back in the pecking order to know what it was."

  Parsifal reached down and snapped the rubber bands around Harry's neck. Harry winced. Parsifal whispered directly into his ear, "Don't fuck with me, Harry. Did you ever see Egidio's Medici in a consortium context?"

  "You know better than that. I never saw anyone in a consortium context."

  "Egidio had to report to someone."

  "When Egidio signed me on, he said the consortium was someone's swan song. He also said it was mainstream, which I took to mean it had friends in high places. Who those friends were was not my business."

  "How do you set up meetings with Egidio de Wey, alias Dewey?"

  "Egidio is the last of the paranoids. When he worked at the Agency we used to joke about how he talked to his mother through a cutout. The consortium's run the same way. We're tightly compartmented. Egidio and me, we never meet. We communicate through cutouts. I don't even have a phone number for him. I got a lifetime supply of dead drops, I phone up an unlisted number in Houston, I activate a dead drop with a code word, I leave off the money I won from the Apache casino. If Egidio needs to contact me, he leaves off a code word on my answering machine and I service the appropriate dead drop for his instructions."

  Pieces of the puzzle were beginning to fall into place for Parsifal. "Of course! The money Harry here wins from the casino bankrolls the consortium. It's less traceable and easier to come by than money laundered by Early." He turned back to the prisoner. "What is the consortium's brief? What is it out to accomplish?"

  "It was not something I needed to know, so Egidio never told me."

  "Funny, those were Early's exact words. You don't work in a vacuum; you have to have an idea. Is the consortium Special Projects gone to ground? Is it Dewey in a new incarnation as Mafia capo? Is it the CIA taking care of its own, a sort of golden parachute for retired agents? Is it a generator of untraceable funds for unauthorized operations?"

  A whiff of Harry's old spirit returned. "Go ahead, pull the fucking bag over my head again. I'll open my fists to keep from drowning. But when I

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  can talk, I'll tell you the same thing I'm telling you now. There's no way I can tell you what I don't know."

  "Let's talk about your dead drops. Give us examples."

  "There's one under a broken manhole cover in the parking lot behind the Indian arts museum in Santa Fe. There's a hollowed-out space behind an old framed map of the New Mexico Territory in the Kit Carson Museum in Taos. There's a pigeonhole in an Anasazi ceremonial cave in Fri-joles Canyon near Los Alamos."

  "Who selects the drop?"

  "The dropper."

  "Who services the drop?"

  "The droppee —namely the next person up or down in the consortium's pecking order."

  "If you drop something off for Dewey, he personally picks it up?"

  "That's the way the consortium is structured. I'm the cutout between Egidio and Early. Egidio is the cutout between me and the next rung up. Egidio and me, we're tight. Except for the phone contact, between us there is no cutout."

  "What's the code word for the manhole behind the museum?"

  "Silkworm."

  "How about the map in Taos?"

  "Monkey Business."

  "And the Anasazi pigeonhole?"

  "Clay Pigeon."

  "If you're lying to me . . ."

  Harry managed a pained smirk. "If I'm lying, I'm dying."

  "Which brings us to the unlisted phone in Houston."

  Harry's Adam's apple worked above his green bow tie as he came up with the telephone number.

  Suddenly Parsifal's eyes narrowed and his breath came in short soundless gasps. "Repeat the number."

  Harry repeated the number.

  "When you dial it, who answers?"

  "A man who speaks English with a funny accent. He talks through one of those speech-altering devices."

  Parsifal said softly, "You ask if you've reached a certain number, then you read off the number of the booth you're calling from. The man who answers says you have dialed a wrong number and hangs up. Ten, twelve

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  minutes later, t
he time it takes for him to get to a public booth, he calls you back at the number you gave him."

  "Yeah," Harry said, surprised.

  "How did you know that?" Finn asked.

  Parsifal walked over to the paneless window and stared out into the night. He felt a current of warm air on his face and got a faint whiff of the fire he'd put out with fistfuls of sand. After a long moment he turned back to Finn. "Sorry. What did you say?"

  "I asked how you knew about the business with the phone."

  Parsifal's mind was tearing through scenarios. "It's a kind of standard operating procedure among spooks," he said.

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  The fantasy had worked at Wadi Ta'if too; Finn had run the film backwards to where Lieutenant Pilgrim called in the air strike, and had rewritten the script. Then reality had intruded —the stench of burning tires and burning corpses had stung his nostrils, had brought tears to his smarting eyes. It had struck Finn then, it struck him now, how tough it was to superimpose your imagination on reality; to reverse a reality. There were times when you could get away with it, but the effect only lasted the blink of an eye.

  He wondered whether his newfound Russian friend who lived by a clock set ten hours behind was more proficient; he wondered whether Mr. Howard was in touch with reality, or creating a convenient reality through an act of imagination.

  Was the consortium nothing more than a bunch of retired Washington spooks riding a gravy train, or a sinister plot of some kind?

  Was there more to it, or less to it, than met the eye?

  Wrestling with the riddle, Finn stole uphill through the fields. At the far edge of Watershed Station, he cut across Sore Loser Road and flitted like a shadow through the yards behind the houses to the general store. He felt over the lintel for the skeleton key, let himself in the kitchen door, peered into the main room, half-expecting—half-hoping!—to see Shenandoah, soaking her long delicate fingers in lukewarm water, look up and greet him with a smile and a whimsical "Say hey, Saint Louis." But the room was dark and still and empty. Taking the steps two at a time, Finn made his way up to the second floor. He noticed light seeping under the door of Doubting Thomas's room, stuck his head in and found the boy hunched over in bed, reading a book by flashlight.