“Because I now know about Killingsworth?”
“That’s mostly it.”
“What other pressure points have you got besides the Congressional investigation threat — just in case I still say no?”
“Four others.”
“As good?”
“Better. Much better.”
I nodded and looked out at the snow. It seemed to be coming down even harder than before and somehow that seemed only normal. “So I’m to work it out any way I can,” I said.
“You’re to draw upon your extensive experience which, you’ve given me to understand, has been mostly with thieves. There’s no reason that you shouldn’t feel quite at home with us.”
“I’ll need some help,” I said.
Coors didn’t like that and he shook his head to prove it “You can’t bring any outsiders into this. I thought I made that plain. They’d never stand for it upstairs.”
“They’ll have to stand for it,” I said. “I’ll let you explain why.”
“Thank you,” he said and drummed the fingers of his left hand on the desk. “Well, I suppose you needn’t tell them anything vitally important.”
“Such as the truth?”
“Yes,” he said. “There’s that.”
“I’ll tell them as little as possible.”
“How many?”
“Two.”
“Who are they?”
“Let’s just use their code names,” I said. “One’s called Expensive, the other one’s Costly.”
“Your fee’s already been negotiated.”
“Negotiations have just been reopened.”
“Three percent of a million is thirty thousand dollars,” Coors said. “That’s a great deal of money for what may not be more than a long weekend.”
“I usually get ten percent and I haven’t punched a time clock since Chicago.”
“Impossible.”
“I’ll settle for five percent since the million is mythical anyhow. That’s my last offer.”
“Four,” he said.
“In advance.”
“What’s your bank in New York?”
I told him and he wrote it down. “It’ll be deposited to your account tomorrow. You pay your own expenses, of course.”
“That’s something else I think we should discuss.”
“No chance,” Coors said and took an envelope from his inside pocket and handed it to me. “An outline is in there plus names, addresses, points of contact, and a suggested timetable.”
I put it away and we talked for another three-quarters of an hour until I said, “I think that does it.”
Coors glanced over his bare desk as though in search of some scrap of information that might have escaped him. “I don’t have anything else unless you have some more questions,” he said.
“One,” I said. “What if I get into trouble?”
He smiled for the first time in a long while and it may have been the same one he wore when they let him watch the Secretary sign the papers that imposed harsh new economic sanctions on some bankrupt country. “If you get into trouble, Mr. St. Ives,” he said, “do drop me a postcard.”
A small shivering light-brown man in a thin cotton raincoat got out of a cab at the State Department’s green-canopied Twenty-first Street entrance and held the door open for me and then trotted off before I could thank him. The driver twisted around in his seat.
“Now that was a goddamned decent thing of him to do, wasn’t it?”
“Very.”
“He’s from Samoa.”
“I was pretty sure he wasn’t from around here.”
“Where to?”
“The library.”
“You mean the Congressional or the main public one?”
“The public one.”
He was listed on page 391 of the current Congressional Directory under the Department of State section. First there was the Director of Intelligence and Research and then, thirteen lines down, was Hamilton R. Coors, director, Office of Intelligence for USSR and Eastern Europe.
It said that he lived at 3503 South Whitney Road in MacLean, Virginia, so I wrote it down in case I ever needed to send him a postcard.
6
He was about my height, a little over five-feet-eleven, and my weight, 160 or so, and he had my coloring with its sunkissed complexion, and he nearly had my green eyes that some girl had once called sensitive but which my ex-wife had always liked to describe as shifty. His hair also resembled mine in that it still seemed confused about whether to turn dark blond or light brown before it disappeared forever.
If you were slightly nearsighted, without glasses, and perhaps thirty-five feet away, you could have mistaken one of us for the other, but not if you moved much closer because he carried at least ten fewer years than I did and there were those who would have said that he was far better-looking. I was one of them.
The snow had followed me back from Washington and I was late arriving. He must have been waiting in the lobby of the Adelphi, but I wasn’t aware of him until he approached the desk where I’d stopped to see whether anyone other than the circulation manager of Time had bothered to write.
“Mr. St. Ives?” he said to my back.
I turned and said yes, I was St. Ives.
“I am called Artur Bjelo. I wonder if you would be so kind as to spare me a few moments?” His English was precise, as if he’d learned it carefully, but would never be able to get his tongue around the w’s.
“What’s on your mind?” I said.
He smiled and it came on boyishly, but he may not have been able to help it because he was not much more than twenty-five. I got some minor satisfaction from noticing that my teeth were almost as good as his. “Mr. Anton Pernik,” he said and stopped smiling. “He is very much on my mind.”
I looked at my mail. It wasn’t from Time after all. It was from Harper’s. I put it away in a jacket pocket to savor later.
“Pernik, the poet,” I said.
“Yes,” he said, “the poet.”
“How about a drink?”
“In some private place?”
“The Adelphi bar,” I said, “is about as private a place as one can find.”
I never thought of the Adelphi as run-down — only neglected by both management and the public. It was primarily a residential hotel patronized by show people, retired brigadier generals and above, their widows, a few of the older call girls, a mysterious gentleman from Karachi, and a host of middle-aged men in dark suits who carried attaché cases, smoked cigars, and talked to each other in the elevator about how the weather was in Miami last week.
I had been living there in a deluxe suite (which meant that it had a Pullman kitchen) for nearly five years, but I had yet to eat a decent meal in its Continental Room whose chef boasted of having smuggled his secret recipes all the way from Bartlesville, Oklahoma.
Still, the bar wasn’t bad if you ordered nothing more complicated than a Manhattan. We settled at one of the dark oak tables and I asked for a Scotch and water while Bjelo called for a Margarita which meant that we wouldn’t get our drinks for another few minutes because Sid, the bartender, would have to send out for some Tequila. It was that kind of a place.
“What about Pernik?” I said, reaching for a pretzel.
“He is to be exchanged for your ambassador to my country who has been kidnapped.” He must have caught my expression because he added quickly. “Already it is on the Associated Press service.”
Coors had said the story would be released that afternoon and because of the snow it had taken me three hours to get back to New York so I couldn’t find much wrong with the time element. “They have an AP service where you work?” I said.
“At the United Nations,” he said.
“The story wouldn’t have mentioned my name.”