"No glasses?" Daniels asked.
"No."
"How can you expect a man to drink in his own private home straight from the bottle?" Daniels asked, twisting off the cap and dropping it into the white porcelain sink. "What are you, Snodgrass? Some kind of animal that never lived in a house? Where were you brought up, some South American jungle or something?"
Indignantly, Barney Daniels raised the bottle to his lips and let the clear, fiery liquid pour into his mouth and singe it clean. He swished the tequila in his mouth, careful that it washed over each tooth and numbed the gums. Then he spat it over his right arm, twisting around so the spray splattered the sink. He softly exhaled, then inhaled. It was good tequila. Magnificent.
Finally, he took a long swig and sucked it into his whole body. The ducks disappeared.
"Cigarette," he said weakly and took another sip from the bottle.
Snodgrass flashed open a gold cigarette case filled with blue-ringed smokes. With deft hands, Daniels plucked out all of them, leaving the case shining and empty before Snodgrass could close it. He stuffed one in his mouth and the rest in his pocket.
"Those are imported Turkish, my special blend," Snodgrass whined.
Daniels shrugged. "Got a light?"
"I'd like some of them returned."
"I'll give you two. Got a light?"
"You'll return the rest."
"All right. Four."
"All of them."
"They're crushed. You wouldn't want crushed cigarettes, would you?"
Snodgrass snapped the case shut and returned it to his vest pocket. "You're a disgrace. No wonder upstairs is so happy to get rid of you."
He did not look at Daniels when he said it, but busied himself taking three form papers and a small green check from his case. "Sign these and this is your check."
"I don't have a pen."
"Return this one," Snodgrass said, offering a gold pen.
Daniels grasped the pen between right thumb and forefinger, looking at it quizzically. "It's not one of your idiot gas gun devices, is it?"
"No, it's not. That was always the trouble with you, Daniels. You were never a team player. You never learned to adjust to modern methods."
Daniels steadied the bottle between his knees and signed the papers in long even grade-school penmanship strokes. He finished with a flourish. "What did I sign?"
"That you resign officially from Calchex Industries for which you have worked for twenty years, the only firm for which you have worked."
"All three of them say that?"
"No. The others say that you resigned from the firm because you embezzled money from it."
"Pretty nice. Anytime I open my mouth, you can get a warrant, pick me up nice and legal and no one will ever see me again."
"Well, if you want to be crude about it, yes," Snodgrass said, his eyebrows arching disdainfully. "Ordinarily, of course, such a thing would never happen. But you're not an ordinary case." He forced the papers into his attache case, then, smiling as though someone had just forced gravel into his gums, he surrendered the check.
"This should bring you up to date," Snodgrass said. "Your next pension check will arrive about May first." He looked Daniels up and down as though Barney were a malignant tumor. "This is just my personal opinion, Daniels," Snodgrass added, "but, frankly, it makes me sick to see you collect a pension at all, after what you did to the company back there in Hispania."
"I know how you feel, Max," Barney said sympathetically. "The company gave me the fantastic opportunity of being tortured limb by limb for three months, having my fingers broken at the hands of your local thugs, getting drugs poured down my throat, not to mention the exquisite pleasure of feeling your emblem burned into my belly with hot irons, and I have the nerve to accept a four hundred dollar check from you." He shook his head. "Some people just got no gratitude." He drank deeply from his bottle.
"You know we didn't do that," Snodgrass snapped.
"Stuff it, Max." He drank again. The liquor felt like a friend. "I don't care. You and the rest of your clowns can do whatever you want. I'm out."
"The company didn't do it," Max said stubbornly. Barney waved him away.
"Tell me something, Snodgrass. I've always wondered. Is there really a Calchex Industries?"
"Certainly," Snodgrass said, glad to be off the subject.
"What does it do besides provide pensions for cashiered CIA agents?"
"Oh, we operate a very thriving business. At our main plant in Des Moines, we manufacture toy automobiles aimed at the overseas market. We sell these to a major company in Dusseldorf. There they are all melted down and the steel is sold back to us to make more toys. All very up and up. We own both Calchex and the German company. Calchex hasn't missed a dividend in fifteen years."
"Good old American enterprise."
"Are you planning to work, Daniels?"
"Yes, yes. Quit peeing your pants about what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. I am planning on devoting the major portion of it to research on the lifesaving properties of tequila."
"I mean a job. We can't have you running around getting involved in wild schemes." He looked worried.
"I've got a job," Daniels lied.
"Nothing in South America, of course."
Daniels sipped some more tequila and nodded slowly. "I know what I'm allowed to do."
"Just so you know. Nothing controversial and nothing outside the borders of the United States."
"Don't worry about it. I'm going to be a librarian."
"I suppose you expect me to believe that."
"I do."
Snodgrass turned crisply to go. Before he reached the kitchen doorway, he turned back to face Daniels. "I'm sorry things didn't work out for you," he said, suddenly contrite about his crack that Barney didn't deserve his paltry pension. Daniels had been one of the best agents the company had ever used. And use him it had, over and over, in missions where none of the CIA's expensive gadgetry was worth a fart in the wind next to Barney's courage and cunning.
There had been no one better. And now there was no one worse. Snodgrass looked to Daniels, sucking on his tequila bottle like a gutter rummy, and remembered the final episode in the professional life of Bernard C. Daniels. How he had crawled into Puerta del Rey more dead than alive after God knew what unspeakable happenings in the Hispanian jungle, how he drank himself back to health, and then called a press conference to announce, between hacking up blood and giggling drunkenly: "Do not fear. The CIA is here."
In five minutes, he spilled more about CIA operations than Castro had learned in five years.
Snodgrass looked at the bottle, then up at Barney.
"Forget it," Barney said, answering the question in Snodgrass's eyes. "It just happened and there isn't any why. And don't knock the tequila. God's greatest gift to tortured man."
He slid forward off the sink. "Now go home. I've got some serious drinking to do."
And Max Snodgrass, whose income tax return listed him as executive vice president of Calchex Industries, walked out of the house and drove away.
Barney wondered, as he polished off the last of the tequila and staggered back to his spot on the upstairs floor, how long the vice president of Calchex Industries would wait before having him killed.
Chapter Two
His name was Remo and he was buying dirt.
He was buying dirt because this was Manhattan, and dirt didn't come cheap here unless it was New York City dirt, the kind that blew out of automobile exhausts or sifted out of the sky or fell from the bodies of its earthier inhabitants who made their homes on the sidewalks. New York dirt was just too dirty.
Remo needed clean dirt that flowers could grow in, even though those flowers would be growing in a window of a motel room off Tenth Avenue, where they would be abandoned shortly after they were planted and replaced by candy wrappers and cigarette butts and used condoms New York dirt.