The Rutledge was the hotel where I’d met him the other time. 1114 was his room. Coat-Checking Service sounded like Kotacek, and I’m sure some bright-eyed young genius spent three weeks of government time thinking up that one and another week patting himself on the back. What was left? The telephone exchange. TRafalgar 4. Meet him a four o’clock? Probably.
I stopped at the desk on the way in and asked the aging faggot room clerk the name of the party in 1114. “Nelson,” he said. Sure, why not? That explained the TRafalgar. They were worse than hog butchers in Chicago; they used the squeal and all.
He opened the door for me, led me inside, made drinks for both of us. He looked exactly as he had looked at our last meeting. The suit was different, a gray one this time, also expensive, also ill-fitting. We found chairs and sat down and looked at each other. I waited for him to start it. He, after all, had called me.
“You’re here,” he said at length. “And on time. The girl who phoned you was afraid you might not have understood the message. Said you made some flip reply, as though she had really called the wrong number.”
“I didn’t want to interest anyone tapping my phone.”
“Of course. That’s what I told her.” He worried the ash on his cigarette. “I know most of what happened this trip, Tanner. I suspect we can call the mission a qualified success. To be quite frank, I don’t think anyone else could have done as well. You got the man out of prison. That in itself was remarkable. And I can think of no better end for him than having him abducted and killed by Israelis. Keeps the U.S. out of it entirely, and puts our friends in Czechoslovakia in rather a bad light. As though the Jews had to get him themselves, don’t you see, because otherwise the Czechs would have let him off too easily. Instead of the fun and games of a war criminal trial, they came off looking like a bad joke. Like the brunt of a bad joke.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m sorry he had to die. And sorry he died without getting his records to you. Though, to be honest again, I never expected much in that direction.” He smiled humorlessly. “I didn’t actually expect to see you again, either.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t know if you have anything you wanted to report, Tanner. But if so, now’s the time.”
I still didn’t say anything. I opened my briefcase and took out Kotacek’s notes and handed them to him. It took him a few seconds to figure out what they were. When he looked up his face was a study. Coat-Checking Service indeed! If he wanted to play games, I had the bat and the ball, and he had a hole in his glove.
“Where did you get these?”
“Kotacek gave them to me. In Lisbon.”
“But the Stern Gang-”
“Thought they had killed him. They didn’t.”
“How did you manage that?”
“I tricked them.”
“You tricked them.” He put out his cigarette and freshened his drink. “You tricked them,” he said again. “That’s incredible. And then you got Kotacek back to Lisbon, where he turned the records over to you. So we get the information, and we also get a nice official-but-unofficial version going around which lists Kotacek as murdered in Prague by Sternists. This gets better and better. We have the best of both worlds, do you see? A live Kotacek whose secrets we know, and an officially dead Kotacek, and-” He sipped his drink. “I don’t suppose I should ask how all of this came about. It’s incredible good luck for us. Does Kotacek still think you are a Nazi? Does he know that you’ve taken this information? Of course” – shuffling the papers – “these are all originals, not copies. He’ll miss them, and no doubt that will tip things. Unless he actually gave these to you? I-”
“Kotacek is dead.”
“But – oh, I see. He died in Lisbon.”
“Yes.”
“His heart, I suppose?”
“No.” I hesitated a moment, then decided the hell with it; it served him right for giving me assignments. I didn’t want to be his boy wonder. I wanted to be left alone, and if he heard this all the way through he would leave me alone for all time. He might slap my wrist for acting without a double-o number or whatever, but that was all he would do to me, and he certainly wouldn’t come knocking on my door with orders to rescue any more grubby Nazis.
“No,” I said, “it wasn’t his heart. I murdered him.”
When I left Kotacek’s room that day I went downtown and found a man named Alfonso Carmona. I told him what I wanted and he in turn told me something I had not known.
“What you seek is illegal in Portugal,” he said. “This is a Catholic nation, you know, and the church prohibits such rites. I assume your friend was not a Catholic?”
“No.”
“Come inside, please. We can talk better in private.” We went into a cold, dark room. “There would be many persons in attendance?”
“Only myself.”
“Ah. Completely private, then.”
“Yes.”
He stroked his smooth chin. “Then it is more nearly possible. I do not have the facilities myself, but there is a friend of mine, a colleague. He cannot do this thing openly, but if you will wait I will call him. Is that satisfactory?”
“Certainly.”
I waited while he made the call and chatted amiably but discreetly with his friend. He wrote out the name of the friend’s establishment and place of business. He took my address and said that he would see that a car and driver were sent to me in an hour’s time. I thanked him and took a taxi back to Kotacek’s house.
He was still out cold. I undressed him, put his best suit on him, and dragged him all the way downstairs again. The pine box still rested on the living room floor. I got him into it and nailed the cover shut. I had just finished when the hearse pulled into the driveway. There were two helpers plus a driver, and the four of us got the coffin loaded and headed for the funeral parlor.
On the way I thought of one of Kotacek’s little speeches. “The ghetto at Bratislava. The way they screamed when we sent them aboard the train… First give them showers. Hah, gas! And then the cremations. The Germans were brilliant technicians. They designed these magnificent crematoria on wheels. That is what one does with human garbage. Turn it to ashes and plow it into the ground. So that it shall be as though it had never existed…”
He had written his own epitaph.
The death certificate written in Athens was still on the coffin. The undertaker studied it, looked over the passport, then raised the coffin lid to examine Kotacek. “He is well preserved,” he commented. “Dry ice?”
“Pardon?”
“When he was shipped here, he was packed in dry ice?”
“Oh. Yes.”
“I thought so. Of course they cushioned his face so that it would not burn the skin. Very well done. Now with cosmetics we could improve his appearance if this were to be a regular funeral, but for a cremation you would not want to bother, would you? I thought not. And there are no other mourners?”