The Green Ripper
'~Very."
"Before I begin, let me say that I am taking you two on faith. I am assuming your hats are white. Left to my own devices, I would not be so revelatory. But when my friend Travis threw the revolver onto the bed, he was exercising his right to have a hunch, and because I have seen how his hunches usually work, I am following it."
I moved over to a more comfortable chair. Jake taped the extraordinary performance. Meyer re membered so much more than I did, I wondered if my brain was slowly turning to mush. He spoke in sentences, in paragraphs, in chapters. Marc scribbled a note to himself from time to time. Whenever I thought Meyer was going to leave something out, he came around to it in the next few minutes. When he was through he was slightly hoarse, and we took a break and ordered up a late room-service lunch. Jake intercepted the cart at the door, signed, and wheeled it in.
During lunch there were some obligatory comments about the weather, the price of hotel rooms, the Miami Dolphins' season, and how much vitamin C you take to ward off the common cold.
After the cart was wheeled out again by Jake and the door closed, Max got up and paced, frowning, chucking his fist into his palm from time to time.
He went back to the desk and looked at his notes. "Give me her description of this Brother Ti tus again, please. As close to her words as you can make it."
"I can make it exact," Meyer said.
"How the hell can you do that?"
"Give me a couple of minutes," Meyer said. He closed his eyes and began to breathe slowly and deeply. His eyelids fluttered. His mouth sagged partly open. I had seen him do it before. It was a form of autohypnosis, and he was projecting himself back to the evening of the seventh.
He lifted his head and opened his eyes. Jake inserted a fresh cassette and punched the tape on again. Meyer spoke in his own voice and diction. "Big, but not fat. Big-boned. About forty, maybe a little less. Kind of a round face, with all of his features sort of small and centered in the middle of all that face." It made the backs of my hands tingle and the back of my neck crawl It was foretell word choice, phrasing, cadence, pauses. It was Gretel, speaking again through Meyer, telling us whom to look for.
"Wispy blond hair cut quite short. No visible eyebrows or eyelashes. Lots and lots of pits and craters in his cheeks, from terrible acne when he was young. Little mouth, little pale eyes, girlish little nose. He was wearing a khaki jacket over a white turtleneck. He was holding onto the side of the passenger door because of the rough ride. His hands are very big and... well, brutal-looking."
The Green Ripper
He stopped and gave himself a little shake, and all three of them looked questioningly at me.
"Absolutely exact," I said. "Just as I remember it. I mean, better than I remember it." I was too boisterous, too jovial, too loud, the way you get when you want to disavow being moved by something. I caught Meyer's look of concern. I envied him his ability to regress himself to the actual scene, to be with her in that way I had no way to be with her. Memory has a will of its own. When I forced it, she would blur out. It had to come to me in sudden takes, little snippets from the cuttingroom floor of the mind. They came smoking in, stunning me.
The tape was stopped. Jake had put the cassettes in a row, in order. He began numbering them, dating them.
Marc looked at his notes. "When there is a near collision in the air, NASA is the investigating agency. They recommend to the FAA the action to be taken. So do the controllers and airport managers. We'll recheck the three of them Toomey, Kline, and Ryan, but will come up probably with just what you have, Meyer."
Meyer nodded and said, 'I keep thin3dog, Max, wondering what those three do represent. Travis caught that faint continental fisvor. But he says the speech was colloquial American."
"Buffalo, St. Louis, or Santa Barbara," I said, "or anyplace in between. Middle height, middle age, no distinguishing features. Office. Flabby and pale. Both with glasses. Invisible men. Clothes off the rack, not cheap and not expensive. HelL if you walked through any downtown past the banks on a Tuesday noon, you'd see them walking together to lunch. If you lined up ten of them, Pd have a sorry job trying to pick out my two."
'~You're describing the average, upper-echelon, middle-Buropean, or Eastern European agent. They don't see enough daylight. They spend a lot of time on the files. They eat too much starch. And the KGB has the best language schools in the world. Crash courses, and they turn out people who can speak the language of the assigned country like a native. Of course, those guys are motivated. If they don't work hard enough learning the language, they end up in Magnitogorsk or some damn place, processing internal travel permits. They're good Just not very flexible. They're not good at jettisoning one plan in mid-flight and inventing a second one that might work."
"But how could they fit into all this?" Meyer asked.
Max grinned at him. "You want another scenario? The way I read it, somebody goofed badly on something very important. So they sent Igor and Vashily here on a tidy-up mission. Plug the holes. Find out who knows what, report back, and await orders."
The Green Ripper
"Their presence would imply some importance to this."
Jake laughed, and snapped one of the eight-byten glossies with a fingernalL "You bet your ass there's something important going on. The presence of this little sphere proves that. We'll go througli the Church of the Apocrypha to locate this Brother Titus and find out if he is coincidence or part of it somehow. I don't have much hope of unwinding anything in Brussels. We've bounced off that wall before. It's very tight over there."
Max stood up and said, "We're very grateful for your cooperation, gentlemen."
'din you contact us again?" I asked.
'doubtful."
"How would we get in touch with you?"
"Why should you?" There was some amusement in his steady gaze.
I said, "Who knows? Something else happens that fits in with this, who do we ten?"
Jade said to Marc, 'If we don't know what's going on, we don't know if they are involved more than they think they are. An identity mixup. Or something observed they shouldn't have seen."
After a moment of thought, Marc nodded and wrote a number down and tore it out of his pad. "Memorwe this number. Use a phone you can control for a couple of hours. It may take that long for a cat/-back. Here is what you say. That line win always answer, day and night. The person will say hero. You say, 'Was somebody at this number try" ingto reach Travis McGee?' They'll say they don't know, but they can check around and find out. Then you say, 'If anyone was, I can be reached at such and such a number.' then wait. Clear?"
"Perfectly," I said.
Max stood a little taller and said, "You shouldn't have gone out to see Broffski and Slater. The cover story was halfway okay, but frail. What you shouldn't do, either of you or both of you, is push at this thing any more, from any direction. We've satisfied ourselves you can both keep your mouth shut about what you learned here. Finding out the kind of security clearance you had once upon a time, Meyer, helped in that decision. So lay low. Keep down. Bleep quiet. In return for that, I promise I'll find some way to let you know when we've tidied up. No, don't leave just yet. I have to make a call."