"All right!" Piggott burbled. "All right!"
"When and where are the assassinations scheduled to take place?"
"I don't know anything about any assassinations!"
"Wrong answer," Garth said, tapping the stock none too gently on the man's head. "We saw the two shooters going through their paces this afternoon. Do you expect us to believe they were tuning up for duck season?"
"I don't know what those two plan to do," Piggott whispered in a barely audible voice. "I don't even know their names, or the name of the guy who brings them around. I was just told to let them practice here. Nobody's supposed to even talk to them."
Garth took the stock away from the man's head, then tossed him a dirty pillow from the sofa bed. Piggott pressed the pillow to his beer belly, wrapped himself around it.
"Do they ever stay in the compound?"
"No."
"Where are they now?"
"I don't know. I never know when they're going to show up to practice, and I don't know where they go when they leave."
Garth apparently believed him, for my brother's response was to look over at me and shrug his shoulders.
I asked, "Where's Guy Fournier?"
Piggott moved his head slightly so as to look at me. His eyes shone with pain, humiliation, and fear. "I don't know any Guy Fournier. It sounds like a frog name, and I don't know any frogs."
"What makes you so accommodating to these people who come here and go as they please? They're obviously not the types you normally associate with."
"I'm just following orders."
"Whose orders?"
"A woman. I don't know her name. She talks to me on that radio over there."
"Jesus Christ," Garth said. "It's like the fucking Wizard of Oz."
"Pay no attention to the woman behind the radio."
"It's the truth!" Piggott wheezed.
I walked over to the radio, turned it on, and tapped the microphone. "Maybe I'll give her a buzz. What frequency does she use?"
"The one it's locked on. It's the only frequency on the radio that works."
That was interesting. It was also interesting that the steel casing of the radio didn't have a serial number in the place where one would normally expect to find it, nor anywhere else that I could see.
It looked like a specialized piece of company equipment. I considered the notion that beneath his tattoos and greasy hair and potbelly Paul Piggott might be a highly skilled, expertly camouflaged, and very gutsy CIA operative, but just couldn't wrap my mind around the idea. He was just one more company pawn, like so many of the other people we were wading through. I asked, "Do you have a code name?"
"No."
"How do you contact this woman when you want to have a chat?"
"I don't. She contacts me when she wants to talk. I carry a beeper when I leave the cabin. When it goes off, I come to the radio and turn it on."
I leaned over the microphone, pressed the switch on the base. "Hello, hello, hello? This is spook radio. Anybody out there? Over."
I released the switch and turned up the volume, but there was nothing but the crackle of static on the speaker. When I turned the dial, even the static disappeared. I looked over at Garth. "What does your bullshit antenna tell you?"
My brother shrugged again. "It indicates he's telling the truth."
"Things just get curiouser and curiouser."
"It makes sense that they'd seal these pinheads off tighter than a bulkhead."
I walked over to Paul Piggott, who had rolled over on his back and pressed a dirty handkerchief to his broken nose in what appeared to be a successful attempt to stop the bleeding. I asked, "Does the name Thomas Dickens ring a bell with you?"
He didn't answer right away, and seemed to be thinking about it. He rolled his eyes first to the right, then to the left, and finally back to me. "I think that's the name of the nigger you were using to-"
He abruptly stopped speaking and sucked in his breath when I rested my foot on his bulging stomach. I pressed down, but not too hard. Piggott was finished, and needed only to be asked the right questions. There conies a point, probably already passed in this cabin, where a little appropriate physical persuasion becomes torture. I did not need nor want to inflict any more pain. I said, "Watch your mouth."
"For Christ's sake, is that what this is all about?!"
"What did you think it was about?"
"What do you want from me?!"
"Who told you to call Taylor Mackintosh and tell him to come to my office and try to bribe me?"
"The woman on the radio," Piggott mumbled, rolling over, getting to his feet, and collapsing once again on the sofa bed. "I'm answering all your questions. Your brother isn't going to hit me again, is he?"
"That depends," Garth said quietly.
"What exactly did this woman say to you?"
Piggott took the handkerchief away from his face, touched his crooked nose, winced. "She said you were using this nig-this African American to blackmail some guy by the name of Cranny, or Crans, or Kranes. I had it right at the time, but I'm not sure of the guy's name right now. She said this African American was going to claim that this Crans guy had stolen some poems. It didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but the woman said it was important."
I glanced over at Garth, who looked as incredulous as I felt. I asked Piggott, "You don't know who William P. Kranes is?"
He regarded me with a combination of suspicion and fear. "That's the guy's name. I don't know who he is. Should I?"
"Do you have any idea who you're carrying out these little chores for?"
Light glinted in his murky eyes, and the corners of his bloody mouth pulled back in a malevolent grin. "People who are going to make this country a fit place for decent Christian white folks to live in again."
"That's encouraging. Precisely what did this woman want you to do?"
"She said the situation was unclear, and she wanted to explore it-those were her words. She said it looked like you and the African American guy might be cooking up some plan to make this Cranny guy look bad, and she couldn't allow that to happen. I was to send some suit from our organization to talk to you and see if you and the African American guy would take money to make the problem go away. I didn't understand how there could be so much fuss over some poems, but she insisted it had to be taken care of. The suit would be authorized to offer you up to two hundred thousand dollars to keep quiet about whatever it was you knew. A couple of days later she gets back to me and tells me to forget the whole thing, that the problem was going to be handled a different way, but by then I'd already called Mackintosh."
I removed the checkbook I'd taken from Taylor Mackintosh from my pocket, flapped it in front of Piggott. "The money would have been taken from a Guns for God and Jesus checking account?"
"Yeah."
"Where do you get that kind of money?"
"The woman and her people put money into the account when we need something, or when they want us to do something that requires cash."
"Why did you pick Taylor Mackintosh as your bagman? Is he the only suit in your organization?"
"No, but he's the most famous. He's a movie star. I figured you'd be impressed."
I glanced over at Garth, who sighed and looked down at the floor. I knew what he was thinking, shared his sadness and outrage, and sense of total frustration. In the final analysis, Moby Dickens had lost his life because of no other reasons than the company's paranoia, indecision, execrably poor choice of personnel to task, and the sheer stone stupidity of those personnel combined with Guy Fournier's hubris and indifference.
"Hey," Piggott continued. "You want to tell me now what's going on? How come you two have got such a hard-on for me?"