Belsky stepped forward and stood looking down at Craig and when the eyes blinked and stayed open he said, “Who are you working for?”
“You ain’t going to make me talk.”
“They always say that. You know you’re going to talk, Craig. Don’t make us crack you.”
“You bloodless bastard. Stick it up your ass.”
Torrio held Craig’s hand out on the floor and Hathaway stepped on the fingers with methodical brutality. “I can break every bone in your hand. That what you want?”
Craig’s eyes showed his distress. “No. Let me up.”
They picked him up and put him in the chair. Trembling violently, he sat hunched, the hurt hand pinched between his squeezed-together knees. His mouth worked.
“The name,” Hathaway said. “Who you’re working for.”
“The CIA.”
Hathaway made an exasperated sound.
“That’s the truth.”
Belsky said, “I rather doubt you’d recognize the truth if it kicked you in the teeth.”
Hathaway said, “Now you want to try again or do we put you back on the floor and step on that hand again?”
Craig rubbed his knuckles. His whole body was unsteady. Hathaway said, “Get it done or get off the pot, Craig.”
Belsky said, “He takes a mulish delight in prolonging this. If he had any courage at least he’d have the dignity to be willing to die without wasting anyone’s time.”
Craig simpered. “You ain’t going to kill anybody.”
Hathaway was indifferent. “Why not? It’d be just another funeral nobody’d go to.”
“It’ll just be an entry in a file someplace,” Torrio said. “Where they make out the compensation check to your widow.”
“He’s not married,” Hathaway said.
“Then he ain’t got anybody at all to grieve for him.”
Belsky said, “Aleksandr Bakst. Forty-one years old, born in the Tadzhik SSR. Recruited into KGB from the Polotsk petrochemical plant where you were a security guard. You finished training at Amergrad in 1955 and came here the same year.”
Hathaway said, “I knew him from back there but he’s not in our cell and we’re not supposed to recognize them out loud.”
“In this case it hardly matters since he won’t leave this house alive,” Belsky said. “I suggest we walk him into the bathroom and see how well he breathes under water. Drown him in the toilet bowl but space it properly so that he goes up and down for a long time, choking, wanting air.”
There was always a weak point and he had found Craig’s—water. Craig took it badly. He dragged his uninjured left hand down across his face and began to shake. His eyes became lacquered with horror and Belsky gave him ample time to construct a vivid picture before they walked Craig into the bathroom. Only then did Craig break the ugly silence, in a high-pitched voice that twanged. “What do I get out of it if I do tell you?”
“Of course we can’t let you go. You see that.”
Craig swallowed. Belsky said, “If we have to dig for it you go into the toilet. If you turn the bag up and shake it out for us we’ll make it fast and easy and you won’t feel it.”
“I guess that just ain’t good enough,” Craig said. Aimlessly his left hand stirred toward his shirt pocket and plucked out a pack of cigarettes. Hathaway batted the pack out of his hand and then gave him one of his own cigarettes.
Craig said resentfully, “My cigarettes ain’t poisoned. I can’t stand these menthol things.”
“Yeah,” Torrio said gravely. “They might give you cancer.” He cupped his fingers to examine his nails.
Belsky said, “You’re a licensed private detective and you were hired to make a tape of our meeting. The people who set it up had to know about the meeting. I can think of only two men who knew about it and didn’t attend. Therefore all I need to do is kill both of them to insure our safety—so you see we don’t need your information vitally. It will only be corroboration and it might save one man’s life.”
Hathaway was bouncing the heavy leather-covered blackjack in his open palm. Craig looked at that and at the lidded toilet bowl. Saliva ran out of the corner of his mouth and he said, “All right.”
Hathaway said, “That’s more like it.”
“He called you Aleksandr Bakst,” Belsky said, “and he spoke the names of your parents by way of identifying himself. He said he had orders from Moscow and you had to tape these proceedings for him.”
Now the hate shone through Craig’s fear. “If you already know the answers why push me around?”
“Because I want to know which one called you.”
“Maybe I didn’t catch his name.”
“Put him in the toilet,” Belsky said and began to turn away.
“Jesus H. Christ. It was Trumble. Congressman Trumble. He called me from Phoenix about one o’clock this morning and he said he couldn’t get to the meeting but he had orders to cover it so he had to have a record of it.” Craig gripped the edge of the sink; he looked faint. “I swear that’s the truth. That’s all he told me.”
“I heard you say that before.”
“I’m not holding out on you.”
“How do you know it was Trumble?”
“You can’t mistake that voice. Christ, I know the man. It was him.”
“All right.” Belsky nodded to Hathaway and Hathaway bludgeoned Craig behind the ear. Torrio caught him and held him up against the sink but Craig was unconscious. Belsky said, “Have you got a place to keep him?”
“Alive?” Hathaway showed his surprise.
“Yes. I may need to question him again.”
“You think he was lying?”
Belsky said, “I’m not going to stand in this damned bathroom and argue the point. You understand simple orders, don’t you?”
Torrio said, “We’ll put him on ice. Don’t worry about it.”
“I won’t,” Belsky said, and looked at his watch and left.
Chapter Eight
“We’ve got a war against Communism, gentlemen—pretty soon every man is going to have to stand up and be counted. We’ve got to keep stopping them every place they try to move in. Fight them on their own ground because if we don’t do that now we’ll be fighting them in Alaska and Hawaii and then in Chicago and New York. And it’s too late when you have to do that.”
Senator Woodrow Guest continued, “Some people among us would like to disarm us and show the world what nice friendly peace-loving pacifists we are. Look, there’s nothing in the book that says they can’t lick us or won’t. We can be defeated. But some of our well-meaning crypto-socialists have blinded themselves because they want to think the Soviets are as peace-loving as they are. The left wing has an endless capacity for giving the Commies the benefit of the doubt. It refuses to admit the danger of Communist aggression even when the Reds overrun Tibet and Soviet tanks invade Hungary and Czechoslovakia. This kind of thinking sold us out in Vietnam by caricaturing our military commanders as feebleminded neofascists. This kind of thinking has brainwashed our youth into a wish to believe we’ve got no need for armaments and national security. This kind of thinking makes no distinction between war and the deterrents of war. My Lord, gentlemen, is there no one left in our halls of government who owns a sense of honest outrage?”
When he paused he smiled a little and lifted the lid of his humidor, selected a cigar and held it like a moustache under his nose. His wise elegant face was averted, but Forrester recognized its expression—the look of a poker player trying to decide whether he has impressed his opponent with the strength of his bluff.
Guest stirred in his chair and broadened his grin. “I won’t bore you with the rest of it but it’s a pretty good speech, don’t you think?”
“If you like saber-rattling. I fail to see how it’s relevant to the subject at hand.”