He stepped out into the street and the white Impala, hitting forty by the time he took three steps, still had to swerve if it were going to do it and that made its rear wheels skid just enough to slow it down and give Bjelo the bare split second that wouldn’t have been enough for most people, but seemed plenty for him. He leaped back and to one side and the Impala’s right front fender may have brushed him but it didn’t stop to find out. The car skidded a little again as its accelerating rear wheels grabbed for purchase in the slush and snow, straightened, and then sped east.
Bjelo didn’t bother to look at the disappearing car. He gave his gray tweed coat a perfunctory brush, turned quickly but still calmly, and began walking west at a pace that was little faster than a casual stroll and with the air of a man who finds it pointless to dwell on either near-misses or hits.
I rode the elevator up to my ninth-floor apartment and made a phone call and the young lady with the Yugoslav delegation at the United Nations sounded disappointed when she couldn’t connect me with Artur Bjelo because no one of that name had ever worked there.
I made two more phone calls, long ones, and then I stood by the window and looked out at the snow and tried to decide whether the driver of the Impala had been a professional or an amateur. But even professionals can’t see too clearly at forty miles per hour in twilight snow because it tends to make all men who are about five-eleven with brownish blond hair and pale complexions and identical topcoats look very much alike.
7
They both wore belted trench coats and the shorter one had covered his head with a dark blue beret while the taller one sported a high-crowned pale gray fedora with the brim snapped down both fore and aft. They stood near the Pan Am counter at Kennedy International, their eyes protected from the dark February night by sunglasses, and talked to each other without moving their lips like a couple of tired old cons in a prison run by Warner Brothers.
They didn’t notice my approach, perhaps because they were both only half-turned toward me, but more likely because neither of them could see much of anything through those wraparound shades. I tapped the shorter one on the left shoulder and said, “Did you remember the detonators, Vladimir?”
Park Tyler Wisdom III turned and beamed. “Ah,” he said, “it’s Philip St. Ives, known and feared by the scum of two continents.”
I looked at Henry Knight who wore the fedora with the toadstool brim. “What the hell are you supposed to be?”
“Hardbitten adventurers, chief,” Knight said. “We all dress like this.” He paused to frown at my tweed topcoat and hatless head. “Except you,” he added.
“I’m the clean-cut one in the trio,” I said. “Obviously the leader.” I reached into my coat pocket and handed each of them an envelope. “Here’re your tickets. It’s Pan Am flight two and it’s due out at seven. We arrive in Frankfurt at ten-fifteen tomorrow morning and change to JAT flight three fifty-one at twelve forty-five. We land in Belgrade at three twenty-five.”
Wisdom looked at his ticket. “On the cheap, I see,” he said.
“I thought it would be cozier, three abreast,” I said. “Any trouble about your visas?”
Knight shook his head. “They just asked business or pleasure and I said pleasure.”
“Let’s hope you were right,” I said.
It had taken me only eleven minutes to convince Henry Knight that he should come along. It might have taken longer, except that when I called he was in the middle of a fight with Winifred, his tall, leggy wife who looked like a show girl but who wrote and illustrated remarkably tender and successful children’s books. When I was about two-thirds of the way through my pitch, Knight had said, “Hold on a second, Phil.”
I could hear Winifred yell something at him and, perhaps because he couldn’t resist the opportunity, he had yelled back, “Why don’t you just write me about it in Belgrade!” Then he returned to the phone with, “When do we leave?” Pride, I long ago found out, often causes the decisions made in the heat of a domestic argument to be just as irrevocable as they are stupid. But Knight’s quick decision may have been influenced by the fact that he had been in between plays for eight weeks and Winifred was on a tight deadline and since I was offering all expenses plus double the Equity scale, it probably sounded better than sitting around the house waiting for his agent to call with some fanciful explanation about how Knight had just missed getting on Carson next week. I didn’t worry about the domestic spat. After fourteen years of marriage, Henry and Winifred Knight still thought of each other as the world’s most interesting person.
Park Tyler Wisdom III, holder of the Silver Star and some Purple Hearts for performing what he had once called “an extraordinary deed of incredible pusillanimity in the face of overestimated odds” while spending two years in Vietnam, was more difficult to convince than Knight. I had to talk twelve minutes, although four of them were spent declining an urgent invitation to join Wisdom and some friends that evening in a planning session whose aim was to deluge the Pentagon with the nation’s worn-out ballpoint pens. The idea, it seemed, was to start a nationwide rumor that the military desperately needed the pens for use in some top secret testing project.
“We could use your help, Phil,” Wisdom said. “What do you think of ‘Pens for the Pentagon’?”
“That should get them a million or so.”
“Rumor has it that they need fifty million.”
“I’ve got a dozen or so I’ll send tomorrow. What about the trip?”
“How long?”
“Four days, maybe five.”
“Winifred’s going to let Henry stray?”
“They’re in the middle of a fight and she’s on a deadline.”
“And we’ll bring out the poet and his granddaughter?”
“It could change,” I said. “You might just be going along for the ride.”
“I never could say no to my President,” Wisdom said.
“He didn’t ask you,” I said. “I did.”
“Why me?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I thought you could use the money.”
“You’ve always worked these go-between things alone before, haven’t you?”
“Until now.”
“Why the change?”
“I can’t be in two places at once and if something happens in the place I’m not in, I need someone who won’t panic or who at least is a good enough actor not to show it.”
Wisdom was silent for a moment. “And you think I won’t panic?”
“No,” I said. “I think you’re a hell of a good actor.”
There was another brief silence and when Wisdom spoke against the gentle self-mockery that was usually in his tone had gone. “Since you seem to know what you’re getting, I’ll go.”
“I know what I’m getting,” I said. “That’s why I asked you.”
“Thanks,” he said in that same quiet, thoughtful tone. “I really mean it.”
“I know,” I said
Before Wisdom had gone off to Vietnam and his something less than meteoric rise to buck sergeant in the First Air Cavalry division, he had been to all the right schools, starting when he was six, and seemed destined to live the pleasantly well-ordered life of one who, having inherited seven million dollars at twenty-two, had nothing more bothersome to ponder than what to do with the twenty-one million or so that he’ll inherit at thirty-five.
After his first one-year tour was over, he signed on for another one. “It was early 1965 then and I honest to God liked it,” he once told me. “I liked being Sergeant Wisdom and soldiering and yelling at privates and the rest of it. Even combat. It was neat and tidy and I knew who the hell I was. I was Sergeant Wisdom of the goddamned infantry. It was my own clearly defined niche in a highly structured framework that just happened to be a war.”