The second print was a grainy enlargement of a small section of the first. It showed one young face and parts of the adjacent two.
Ross said, “Kendig all right. But you’d have to know him to tell. This was a nineteen-year-old kid.”
“It’s the only picture of him we’ve got, so far,” Cutter said.
“Where’d it come from?”
“Myerson went through the Army personnel records division in Saint Louis. This belonged to some guy who went through boot camp with Kendig. Then they shipped out to different outfits. This guy never saw Kendig again.”
Ross put the photographs down and went back to packing things into his attache case. “Doesn’t he have any friends? I mean everybody’s got friends.”
“With the possible exception of Kendig. Well there was me for a while. And there was a woman.”
“Would he get in touch with her?”
“He might, if he knows a medium,” Cutter said drily. “She’s been dead for three years.”
Ross looked at him sharply. “Three years. That was about the time he got his cover blown, wasn’t it?”
“Around then, yes.”
“One thing have anything to do with the other?”
“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Kendig.”
“I will.”
“Sure,” Cutter said. He was smiling but there were subtle vibrating signs of great controlled pressures in him. “Look, don’t leave yourself absolutely wide open, will you?”
“I’ll be careful.”
“All the time I knew him I never saw him sleep more than four hours at a stretch. Kendig’s got a consummate control of time. And he knows how to pace himself. If you ever get close to him you’ve got to intercept him, you can’t chase him-he’ll outrun you every time.”
“You make him sound like some kind of four-minute-miler.”
“He’s fifty-three years old but I imagine he could run the shoe leather off you, Ross, if he had a hundred yards’ head start.”
“But he’s no sprinter?”
“He doesn’t let himself get caught in a position where he needs to sprint.”
Ross picked up the attache case and hung his jacket over his shoulder by one fingertip. “I guess that’s everything. My bag’s down in the car.”
“Good hunting,” Cutter told him. “I guess I ought to say something like that.”
“You’re just absolutely convinced it’s a blind alley, aren’t you.”
“Sure. But it may give us a lead. Get it all on tape and we’ll all go over it when you bring it back.”
Ross swallowed that without a retort and went out. He threw the attache case in the back seat and pulled out on the highway to Dulles.
On the plane he read the copystats of the fifty-one pages they now had of Kendig’s expose. The latest sixteen-page chapter had arrived at the French publisher’s office four days ago, having been posted in Charleston on the day after James Butler had set sail from that port. The typescript was double-spaced, which made it easy to read between the lines. You had to give the bastard credit for effective understatement. Another few chapters like these and he’d blow the lid off every capital that counted.
It was cleverly conceived and executed; there was no innuendo, every statement was flat and factual. A government could deny it or confirm it but nobody could accuse Kendig of slanting it or getting things out of context. He simply didn’t go in for interpretation.
The matter of the Hammarskjold assassination-chapter three-was a raw exposition of meetings, decisions taken at specific hours on specific days by named individuals and then a day-by-day trace of itemized actions by individuals, again named, effecting the mechanics of the event. There were no suggestive interpolations, no sub-text. Pages 47 and 48 were missing, withheld by Kendig; page 46 ended with the line, “Documentary evidence to support these facts, and witnesses who took part or observed these events, are as fol-”
Of course it was unsupported testimony but there’d been so many people involved and once the thing was published they’d all be on the defensive, details would be demanded of them, sooner or later one of them would crack and spill his guts out of guilt or disgust or desperation.
In a fine sense it was history and didn’t matter any more but to discount it on that basis would be absurd and specious. Kendig had them over a barrel and the barrel was headed right over the falls. Coming on the heels of the Nixon spectacle a book like this would wreak unimaginable damage because the structure of human faith was so weakened already; at least Ross saw it so, his own convictions having undergone severe questionings and doubts in the past few years. But in the end it came back to the same thing for him: there was still something worth preserving and worth fighting to preserve.
Casablanca was new to him but he’d been in Tangier and the ambience was the same-the startling juxtaposition of unspeakable poverty and first-class modernity. It was a resort city and a capital of commerce and there wasn’t anything in common with the Warner Brothers sets of the old movie that everybody knew. A Mercedes diesel taxi took him to the Hilton and he ate a big dinner and slept the clock around, trying to overcome the glaze of jet lag. In the morning he paid his call on the Agency’s stringer, a beefy sweating backslapper named Ilfeld who was Assistant to the Commercial Secretary at the consulate. Ilfeld brought along a couple of goons in wilted seersucker when they went down to meet the Cape of Good Hope. The port was shallow and not very big and there wasn’t much nautical traffic; Rabat was only a little way up the coast and that was most ships’ preferred port of call.
Ilfeld gave the customs people on the pier some double-talk and the four of them went aboard before anyone was allowed to disembark. The First Officer was a ruddy squat Englishman who told them the way to James Butler’s cabin.
Ross was startled by the closeness of the resemblance when James Butler opened up. It wasn’t Kendig but from a distance it might have been. The eyes were too close together, the hairline was a little wrong, the mouth too thick, the real Kendig was a little taller and less full in the hips and had longer legs.
Butler didn’t seem surprised. “Well come on in, gents.”
Ilfeld said, “You mind a whole lot if we search you for weapons, old buddy?”
“Go ahead. I’m not armed. But go ahead.”
The two goons spread him out in the frisk position with his hands against the top bunk and his feet splayed well out. They went over him meticulously and Ross waited until the ritual had been observed. Then he said, “I suppose you know who we are and why we’re here, don’t you?”
“I know why you’re here. I don’t know who you are.”
Ilfeld flashed an ID wallet and gave him time to read it. “I’m with the consulate staff here. This gentleman is from the State Department in Washington.”
“Sure he is.”
Ross said, “Here’s my identification,” but James Butler didn’t give it more than a glance and Ross put it away feeling a little foolish.
Butler said, “You gentlemen are out of your jurisdiction here.”
“A regular sea lawyer,” Ilfeld said.
Ross said, “You want to come along with us, Mr. Butler?”
“Actually I’m rather enjoying the voyage. I wasn’t planning to go ashore here at all.”
“And if we insist?”
“Then I’ll stand on my rights. You can’t hijack me off this ship if I don’t want to go. Not legally.”
Ross said, “Perhaps you three gentlemen wouldn’t mind waiting outside while I talk with Mr. Butler.” In his pocket he had the recorder running.
Butler sat down patiently. Ilfeld ducked his way out behind the two goons and the bulkhead door rang when it closed. Ross walked two paces-the width of the stateroom-to the porthole and hooked his elbow in it. “Okay, let’s cut the shit. What’s your name?”
“James Butler.”
“Traveling on a false passport is a serious offense.”