“I agree. But neither does it rule you out.”
“So?”
I said, “Jurgens was given a list of names of agents to be taken out. Those were the agents whose areas included the routes of the major drug shipments — Hong Kong, Taipei, Djakarta, Singapore and on toward the Middle East and France and Mexico. As chief of station you were the only executive with that information at your fingertips — the names and covers of all those agents. It couldn’t have been anybody else, Pete. You doubled your own agents.”
I turned to Myerson. “He wanted out. Maybe he can’t be blamed for that. But he had to get rich first.”
Pete said, “I deny it. It’s ridiculous.”
Myerson lit another Havana. “In that case you may as well go, Pete. I expect we’re finished with you for the moment.” He picked up Pete’s letter of resignation and put it into his pocket. “Now that we know what to look for we’ll be able to put men on it. I wouldn’t try to withdraw any money from Switzerland if I were you. Sooner or later we’ll find evidence against you and then we’ll come after you.”
“Even if you have to manufacture fake evidence.”
Myerson snarled. “What do you think this is? A game of croquet? You’re all finished, Pete — accept it.”
After Pete left the office I ate my sandwiches. Myerson glowered through his cigar smoke at the dreary rain outside the windows. “He won’t do anything dramatic, will he?”
“No,” I said. “Pete’s a survivor. He’ll keep running as long as he can.”
“Do you want to chase him?”
“Give that job to somebody else. I want to get out where the air’s cleaner.”
“All right.” Myerson certainly is mellowing. “I’ve got a job for you in Kenya...”
Charlie’s Last Caper
Myerson lived — if that is the word for his peculiar existence — in an ugly house hidden away in a green part of Virginia that might have been a posh suburb were it not for the railroad embankment below the back of the property. Myerson didn’t seem to mind the noise of the trains — or if he did he probably consoled himself with the knowledge that the clattering freights had made it possible for him to buy the land for a song.
When I arrived in the rent-a-car he met me in the driveway. He looked grumpy and unstrung — I couldn’t remember seeing him so nerved up.
“Did you check out a pistol?”
It was a revolver, not a pistol, but Myerson was indifferent to such distinctions and I didn’t say anything; I answered him with a dry look. He’d asked me to requisition the thing and he ought to have known better than to ask me if I’d obeyed — it was another index of how rattled he was.
I squeezed out from under the steering wheel — it has been decades since Detroit last designed a car commodious enough for a man of my bulk — and showed him the weapon. He gave it a cross glance as if suddenly he couldn’t recall why he’d asked my to bring it.
I said, “I’ll use it for a paperweight if you like.”
He clenched his jaw. I said, “I’ll even let you borrow it to shoot rats in your woodpile but that’s as far as I go. As you know, I don’t shoot people. Any fool can shoot people. I’m far too old to start being a fool.”
“You’re far too old and far too fat to be much use to anybody for anything else.”
“I didn’t hasten out here to let you sharpen your tongue on me, either.”
“All right, Charlie. All right.”
“What’s the flap? Why here and not in the office?”
“They’ve got Internal Security people crawling all over the office.” But he said it as if his heart weren’t in it.
“I. S.? What for?”
“Who knows.” He seemed bitter — more weary that I’d ever seen him. “Let me have that thing.” He held out his hand.
When I hesitated his eyes burned briefly with the familiar arrogance of command. A few things ran through my mind but finally I let him take it.
“Wait in the car.” He turned away.
“As a host,” I told him, “you’re a prince.”
“It’s a flimsy house, Charlie. I don’t think the floors could take your weight.” He trudged away.
The reason he hadn’t invited me inside was that his wife Marge detested me. Myerson at one time had taken evident pleasure in explaining to me how loathesome and repulsive she found me. “You nauseate the poor woman, Charlie. You remind her of cancer cells.”
That “poor woman” was a supercilious rail-thin dried-up clubwoman who played incessant golf, drank martinis from noon on, and wore hats with peonies on them. At least I assumed they were hats because she wore them on her head. Under the circumstances I didn’t mind not being invited inside but I was curious to know what he wanted the revolver for. I wouldn’t have put it past him to use it to murder his wife — it had my fingerprints on it, after all, and it was checked out in my name — but even for Myerson, I thought, that would have been a bit raw.
He hadn’t gone into the house. He’d walked away from me around the corner of the screen porch and disappeared into the trees back toward the railroad embankment. A fly inside the porch was banging against the screen trying to get out. I couldn’t begin to fathom what Myerson was up to but I supposed it was possible he’d arranged a meeting back there in the woods with someone — one of ours or one of theirs. More likely one of theirs, I thought; that would explain his desire for a defense weapon.
But I resented his summoning me all the way from Langley just to deliver the revolver. I was the section’s premier field man — not Myerson’s bloody errand boy.
In the shade by the car I was working myself up to the tirade I was going to deliver to him when I heard the approach of one of the frequent freights that disturbed the peace thereabouts. The rataplan clatter grew to nearly earsplitting volume as the train went by. But even so I was certain the sound that punctuated it was the crack of a gunshot.
I’d heard too many of those to have mistaken it.
As I waddled into the woods I heard the train rumble away; it had dwindled nearly to silence by the time I came to the end of the copse above the embankment. I moved with care, staying just within the trees, not wanting to expose myself — I made too ample a target.
But nothing stirred along the embankment. Nothing at all — not even Myerson. He lay awkwardly asprawl on the grass.
He was dead.
I broke the news to the widow and made two phone calls, the second of them to the police. Then by mutual consent I withdrew from the house and returned to the embankment. Myerson, even dead, was better company than Marge.
The revolver was gone. It looked as if someone might have taken it away from him and then shot him, either with that revolver or with another. Myerson hadn’t died immediately. He’d crawled a few yards. The trail of bloodstains began some distance below him along the grassy bank; he’d been shot while standing right on the rim of the railroad cut. It was a brick retaining wall ten or eleven feet high. The grass sloped up from there to where he had collapsed and died.
I noticed one odd thing. He was wearing a shooter’s glove — cloth with leather patches. I hadn’t even known he’d owned one. He hadn’t been wearing it when I’d given him the revolver; I’d have noticed it.
Before the police arrived I had time to reflect on several things — mainly Myerson and my long acrimonious relationship with him. It had never been pleasant for either of us but it had been symbiotic and his death was neither a pleasure nor merely an annoyance. It probably meant the end of my career.
By dying he’d achieved his revenge at last. It was too ironic for anger; I could only brood at his corpse and acknowdege his victory. The apple-polishing political hack had won the last round. The bastard had beaten me. Within a week I knew I’d be out on the street without a job.