I turned and said, “Was it yours originally?”
He shook his head. “Not mine. They gave it to me to finish. They do that sometimes.”
“There’s no million dollars.”
“No,” he said.
“No ransom demand.”
“It’s false,” he said.
“Faked, just like the snatch.”
“Killingsworth doesn’t think so. He thinks it’s real. So do the Yugoslavs.”
“Who pulled it?” I said.
“They’re from Trieste. A pair of them.”
“Italian or Yugoslavian?”
“Half and half. They won’t talk to anyone. They can’t afford to.”
“What about the girl?” I said.
“She goes with her grandfather.”
“Then what?”
“You furnish them with the documents that’ll get them out of Yugoslavia and to the States.”
“And Killingsworth?”
“With her here, he won’t want to stay there. He’s in love, remember? When he returns for consultation, he’ll be allowed to resign. Quietly.”
“What about Pernik?”
“What about him?”
“What happens to him?”
There was only indifference in Coors’s voice. “I suppose we’ll give him a house out in Hyattsville and he can write some more poetry.”
“And the girl?”
“If Killingsworth balks, she goes back to Yugoslavia.
“It’s neat,” I said. “Someday I’d like to meet him.”
“Who?”
“Whoever dreamed this up.”
“His name’s hardly a household word.”
“Neither is shit in some households.”
Coors did frown at that, but erased it quickly and asked, “Shall we get on with it?”
“All right.”
“When you arrive in Belgrade you’ll be met by someone from our embassy. As far as the embassy knows, you’re exactly what you are, Philip St. Ives, professional go-between whose services have been requested by Anton Pernik.”
“That’s a bit thin, even for someone like Myron Greene who dotes on things like that.”
Coors’s tone grew starchy. “Your Mr. Greene has a strong streak of patriotism which I found rather admirable.”
“You mean naive, don’t you?” I said. “If Pernik did ask for me, it was only because you had someone tell him to. But Myron doesn’t expect you to lie. I do.”
I suffered through Coors’s glare until he continued. “Your embassy escort will take you to the proper Yugoslav authorities who’ll furnish you with the pieces of paper necessary to permit Pernik and his granddaughter to leave the country. Then the kidnappers will contact you and you’ll set up the place for the exchange. The Yugoslavs have agreed not to interfere in any way. After the exchange, you escort Killingsworth back to the embassy and we’ll take over from there.”
“And that’s all?” I said.
Coors rested the palms of his hands flat on the desk and looked at me steadily. “Yes. That’s all.”
“There must be something else — an odd loose end or two.”
“No.”
“Haven’t you forgotten someone?”
“Who?”
“Jovan Tavro. You know, the aide to the deposed vice-president. The one who had all the embarrassing information.”
“No,” Coors said. “I haven’t forgotten him.”
“Isn’t he in some kind of trouble?” I said. “I don’t think Tavro would voluntarily hand anything over to Killingsworth unless he was in trouble. Nobody who knew Killingsworth for five minutes would tell him anything either important or confidential, unless he was desperate. So Tavro must be desperate — almost as desperate as you.”
I watched Coors as he increased the pressure of his palms on the desk. “I’m not sure that I follow you,” he said in a special tone that he might have been saving for some Senate investigating committee.
I shook my head. “You follow me fine,” I said. “You’re even a bit ahead of me and your only mistake has been in estimating my catch-up time.”
“Really, St. Ives—”
I rose and leaned over the desk toward him, trying to keep most of it out of my voice, but not succeeding too well.
“What the hell do you think I’ve been doing for the past five years? And who do you think I’ve done it with, a clutch of choir boys? I’ve dealt with thieves, Coors, the professional kind who’ll lie and cheat and sometimes kill just as quickly as they’ll steal, and they’ll steal anything that’ll bring a dollar and even things that won’t. So I’ve had to outthink them at their own line because every last one of them has wanted to steal something and sell back nothing. The only reason they didn’t is that I somehow stayed one jump ahead of them which isn’t as easy as it sounds because a lot of them, were smart. Even clever. That’s not bragging. That’s just how I make a living off professional thieves, who’re as rotten a bunch as you can find, but there’s not one of them who’d dream of trying to con me with the crap you’ve been pushing here this morning.”
Coors sat through it all patiently enough and even looked as if he had listened to part of it. When I was through and sitting back down and smoking another cigarette, he locked his hands behind his head and regarded the ceiling.
“I told them, of course,” he said.
“Told who?”
“Upstairs.”
“What?”
“That you’d tumble, that it was all too thin without Tavro.” Coors sighed at the ceiling. “They wanted to wait.”
“Until when?”
“Until you got there.”
“They were wrong.”
“Yes, they were, weren’t they?” Coors quit looking at the ceiling and used his fingertips to massage his temples again. “I’ve told you no lies. Tavro did go to Killingsworth. He thought Killingsworth might help him, but Killingsworth instead used the information he got from him to pressure us. When love comes late in life to some men, it often affects their judgment. It’s affected Killingsworth’s.”
“So he was kidnapped,” I said.
“Only because we couldn’t trust him. Would you?”
“Not far,” I said.
Coors’s palms were back on the desk again, but they no longer tried to press through it. “By using the Pernik girl and her grandfather as bait we get Killingsworth back to the States and that problem is resolved — no doubt a little melodramatically, but melodrama is often no small part of diplomacy.” He paused and seemed to think about what he had just said and for a moment I half expected him to jot it down.
“That still leaves us Tavro,” I said. “Why didn’t you get him out?”
Coors gave me a thin, almost bitter little smile. “Some forget, I’m afraid, that the Department of State is a large and cumbersome bureaucracy, perhaps only slightly less wieldy than that of our friends in the Pentagon across the river. In such a bureaucracy nothing gets done until it is too late — or virtually too late. If it is actually too late, then obviously nothing should be done and the bureaucracy sighs its collective relief and returns to its beloved routine.”
Coors paused to give me another small, wintry smile. “In Tavro’s case, we are only virtually too late, and through a process of pain with which I won’t bore you, a course of action has been decided upon. In a bureaucracy such as State, I’m sure you realize, there is nothing more difficult than reaching a decision, unless it is reversing that decision once it has been reached.”
“And the decision is to get Tavro out?” I said.
“That’s correct.”
“How?”
Coors shook his head sorrowfully, as if the star of the spelling bee had just stumbled over Cincinnati. “The decision is not how, Mr. St. Ives, but who.”
“Me?”
“Indeed. You.”
“How deep am I in?”
Coors looked at his watch, as if it would tell him. “Too deep to get out.”