The more typical drive to Alamogordo-at one point crossing through a plateau-bounded basin-had been hot and dry, my cotton knit yellow-and-brown T-shirt and brown tropical worsted slacks sticking to me like flypaper (the T-shirt a Navajo pattern purchased at Sears in Chicago, to help me fit in out here in the wide open spaces). The brim of my straw fedora was snugged down, but the sun hadn’t bothered me-I wasn’t even wearing the sunglasses I’d brought along, enjoying the endless skies, which were a clear, rich, unthreatening blue, the occasional clouds looking unreal, like an artist’s bold brush-strokes. The lack of glare, however, didn’t keep that dry heat from turning the Ford into an oven, even with the windows down.
Now, up in these mountains, I found myself rolling the windows up; it was getting chilly, the shadows of evening creeping in like friendly marauders. I had to slip my tan notch-lapel sportjacket on when I pulled over by the road to watch the setting sun paint the desert more colors than an Indian blanket-a gaudy one, at that.
It had taken Drew Pearson almost a month to decide to send me to Roswell looking for flying saucers. I’d been back in Chicago, running the A-1, with both Washington and Outer Space filed under Bullshit in the back of my mind. My agency was doing fine; after a postwar lull, divorces were on the upswing again and personnel investigation was holding steady, while our retail credit work for suburban financial institutions remained the backbone of the business.
“I figured when I didn’t hear from you,” I told Pearson, “you were taking a pass on the little-green-men mission.”
“I received a document relating to that matter.”
“Could you be a little more vague, Drew? I almost understood you.”
“I can’t be specific on the telephone, you know that!”
“I thought you were calling from a pay phone.”
Which was Pearson’s usual habit.
“I am. But I suspect every pay phone in Washington is tapped.”
“Say, I understand there’s a nice room open next to Forrestal in Bethesda, if you want that paranoia of yours looked at.”
“I’m fortunate you don’t charge per witticism, Nathan.”
“What you pay is already pretty funny. So what got you off the dime?”
“… I’ve received a document that appears to be a briefing to the President on the formation of that … magic group.”
“You mean, Majestic Twelve.”
“… Yes. Nathan, please … a little discretion.”
“See, Drew, once you mention receiving a briefing document for the President, this whole discretion thing kinda goes out the window.”
Pearson sighed, but when he continued, he dropped the coyness if not his imperious manner: “I have all twelve names, now, and they’re all credible-people like Admiral Hillenkoetter and General Twining, commanding general at Wright Field.”
Hillenkoetter was head of the CIA, and Wright Field was significant because that was where Marcel had said the wreckage of the saucer had been taken.
“If this is a hoax,” Pearson said, “we have a very knowledgeable practical joker at work.”
“So you want me to investigate Major Marcel’s story,” I said.
“Yes. In particular, I’d like you to talk to the witnesses who claim they saw the crashed craft and the bodies of the crew.”
“Isn’t that the part of the country where they smoke locoweed?”
“Well, there’s smoke, all right, Nathan, but not necessarily from locoweed. And where there’s smoke, there’s-”
“Mirrors…. What’s the latest word on Forrestal?”
“Making good progress, they say.”
“Don’t sound so disappointed.”
Defensiveness edged his tone. “I don’t wish the man any ill, personally. Just politically.”
“Then why don’t you let up on him?”
“What I write and say isn’t having any effect on Jim Forrestal’s state of mind. My sources inside Bethesda tell me he isn’t allowed to read newspapers or listen to the radio and all communication from the outside is strictly controlled. He may be insane, but I’m confident the nation is strong enough, stable enough, to hear the truth, to have the answers.”
Pearson had been asking the questions in his column and on the air: Why had Forrestal’s malady not been detected or acted upon sooner? Who in our government was responsible for concealing this danger to our national security? And to what extent was Forrestal’s medical treatment being compromised by public relations considerations?
Now dry sarcasm colored his voice. “Do you know where your former client’s room is?”
“No.”
“The sixteenth floor of the Bethesda tower. Doesn’t that sound like just the ideal place to keep a potential suicide?”
“More like the ideal place to help keep him away from the press,” I admitted.
“Or maybe they’re isolating him for yet another reason.”
“What would that be?”
“Who knows what drugs they’re pumping into him, or what sort of mind-control magic they’re up to? That hospital is a hotbed of CIA shenanigans, you know.”
“Bethesda.”
“Yes. And if my sources are to be believed, the CIA-Forrestal’s own ‘baby,’ which is a nice irony-is doing research with drugs, electric shock, hypnosis…. Nathan, I just want you to understand-I’m not the villain here.”
“Neither is Forrestal.”
An operator’s voice came in to let Pearson know that he needed to feed in some more coins to keep this conversation going.
After the music of the dropping coins had ceased, Pearson said acidly, “You’re already costing me money. Will you go to Roswell and do this job?”
“Sure, but I want a five-hundred-dollar retainer, in advance, nonrefundable.”
“What if you only work three days?”
“It’s a minimum fee, Drew. I never chase flying saucers for under five cees.”
“… All right. I’m going to send you a list of names that Marcel has given me, with some rudimentary background information. It’ll come Special Delivery, with your retainer check, and your plane tickets. Can you go out there next week?”
I could, and I did. Of course that miserly son of a bitch sent me the cheapest way he could: on a charter flight of retired schoolteachers going to Carlsbad Caverns. At El Paso, the charter group boarded a bus and I rented the Ford. It was a wonder Pearson didn’t expect me to tag along with the teachers and then hitchhike to my first stop.
Sleepy little mountain-nestled Cloudcroft (pop. 265) had the near ghost-town look of off-season, its downtown storefronts no different than in an Illinois or Iowa hamlet; but from a perch overlooking this slumbering resort community loomed a wide-awake ghost of another sort.
The hotel known as the Lodge seemed to have been transported from another time-say, Queen Victoria’s-and another place-the Swiss Alps, maybe. The grand old railway inn was an architectural aberration, a rambling three-story gingerbread chalet-wooden, not adobe, painted gray, trimmed burgundy, with gabled windows, glassed-in verandas and a central copper lookout tower. The shape of the structure was distinct against the New Mexico sky, which at night was a deeper blue but no less clear, with stars like tiny glittering jewels set here and there in its smooth surface, purely for decorative effect, the full moon casting a ghostly ivory luster upon the mansionlike building, whose windows burned with amber light.