“Hey, Charlie.”
Business of rolling eyes heavenward, business of slow turn, exaggerating the forbearance of an extremely patient man.
“Yeah, arreddy.”
“Does Mr. Shaw play solitaire in here much?”
“Whatta you mean—much?”
“Did he ever play solitaire in here before?”
“No.”
“Give me another beer.” Marco went to the telephone booth, digging for change. He called Lou Amjac.
Amjac sounded sourer than ever. “What the hell happened to you?”
“Come on, save time. What happened?”
“Raymond is at the Twenty-second Precinct in the middle of the park on the Eighty-sixth Street transverse.”
“What did he do? What the hell is the matter with you?”
“He rented a rowboat and he jumped in the lake.”
“If you’re kidding me, Lou—”
“I’m not kidding you!”
“I’ll meet you there in ten minutes.”
“Colonel Marco!”
“What?”
“Did it finally break?”
“I think so. I—yeah, I think so.”
At first, Raymond flatly denied he had done such a thing but when the shock and embarrassment had worn off and he was forced to agree that his clothes were sopping wet, he was more nearly ready to admit that something which tended toward the unusual had happened. He, Amjac, and Marco sat in a squad room, at Marco’s request. When Raymond seemed to have done with sputtering and expostulating, Marco spoke to him in a low, earnest voice, like a dog trainer, in a manner too direct to be evaded.
“We’ve been kidding each other for a long time, Raymond, and I put up with it because I had no other choice. You didn’t believe me. You decided I was sick and that you had to go along with the gag to help me. Didn’t you, Raymond?” Raymond stared at his sodden shoes. “Raymond! Am I right?”
“Yes.”
“Now hear this. You stood beside me at Hungarian Charlie’s and you didn’t know I was there. You played a game of solitaire. Do you remember that?”
Raymond shook his head. Marco and Amjac exchanged glances.
“You took a cab to Central Park. You rented a rowboat. You rowed to the middle of the lake, then you jumped overboard. You have always been as stubborn as a dachshund, Raymond, but we can produce maybe thirty eyewitnesses who saw you go over the side, then walk to shore, so don’t tell me again that you never did such a thing—and stop kidding yourself that they are not inside your head. We can’t help you if you won’t help us.”
“But I don’t remember,” Raymond said. Something had happened to permit him to feel fear. Jocie was coming home. He might have something to lose. The creeping paralysis of fright was so new to him that his joints seemed to have rusted.
The capacious house in the Turtle Bay district jumped with activity that evening and it went on all through the night. A board review agreed to accept the game of solitaire as Raymond’s trigger; and once they had made the connection they were filled with admiration for the technician who had conceived of it. Three separate teams worked with Hungarian Charlie, the talker’s talker, the bookmaker, and the young, dumpy blonde.
At first, the blonde refused to talk, as she had every reason to believe that she had been picked up on an utterly nonpolitical charge. She said, “I refuse to answer on the grounds. It might intend to incriminate.” They had to bring Marco in to bail her attitude out of that stubborn durance. She knew Marco from around Charlie’s place and she liked the way he smelled so much that she was dizzy with the hope of cooperating with him. He held her hand for a short time and explained in a feeling voice that she had not been arrested, and that she was cooperating mainly as a big favor to him, and who knew? the whole thing could turn out to be pretty exciting. “I dig,” she said, and everything was straightened out although she seemed purposely to misunderstand his solicitude by trying to climb into his lap as they discussed the various areas, but everybody was too busy to notice, and he was gone about two seconds after she had said, listen, she’d love to cooperate but why did they have to cooperate in different rooms?
The bookmaker was even more wary. He was a veritable model of shiftiness, which was heightened by the fact that he was carrying over twenty-nine thousand dollars’ worth of action on the sixth race at Jamaica, so he couldn’t possibly keep his mind on what these young men were talking to him about. They persuaded him to take a mild sedative, then a particularly sympathetic young fellow walked with him along the main corridor and, in a highly confidential manner, asked him to feel free to discuss what had him so disturbed. The bookmaker knew (1) that these were not the type of police which booked gamblers, and (2) he had always responded to highly confidential, whispering treatment. He explained about his business worries, stating, for insurance, that a friend of his—not he himself—was carrying all that action. Amjac made a call and got the race result. It was Pepper Dog, Wendy’s Own, and Italian Mae, in that order. Not one client had run in the money. The bookmaker was opened up like a hydrant.
Hungarian Charlie, natch, was with it from the word go.
Marco played through one hundred and twenty-five solitaire layouts until the technicians were sure, time after time and averaging off, where Raymond had stopped his play in Hungarian Charlie’s saloon. They tested number systems as possible triggers, then they settled down to a symbol system and began to work with face cards because of the colors and their identification with human beings. They threw out the male face cards, kings and knaves, based on Raymond’s psychiatric pattern. They started Marco working with the four queens. He discarded the queens of spades and clubs, right off. They stacked decks with different red queens at the twenty-third position, which fell as the fifth card on the fifth stack, and Marco dealt out solitaire strips. He made it the queen of diamonds, for sure. They kept him at it, but he connected the queen of diamonds with the faceup card on the squared deck on the bar, then all at once, as it is said to happen to saints and alcoholics, a voice he had heard in nightmares perhaps seven hundred times came to him. It was Yen Lo’s voice saying: “The queen of diamonds, in so many ways reminiscent of Raymond’s dearly loved and hated mother, is the second key that will clear his mechanism for any assignments.” They had it made. Marco knew they had it made. Hungarian Charlie, the bookmaker, and the young, dumpy blonde filled in the background of minor confirmations.
The FBI called Cincinnati and arranged to have one dozen factory-sealed force packs flown to New York by Army plane. The cards reached the Turtle Bay house at 9:40 A.M. A force pack is an item usually made up for magic shops and novelty stores for party types who fan out cards before their helpless quarries saying, “Take a card, any card.” Force packs contain fifty-two copies of the same card to make it easier for the forcer to guess which card has been picked; the dozen packs from Cincinnati were made up exclusively of queens of diamonds. Marco figured the time would come to try Raymond out as player of the ancient game of solitaire that very morning, and he didn’t want to have to waste any time waiting for the queen of diamonds to show up in the play.
An hour after Chunjin had made his report to the Soviet security drop from the red telephone booth at the Fifty-ninth Street exit from Central Park, a meeting was called between Raymond’s American operator and a District of Columbia taxi driver who also served as chief of Soviet security for the region. As they drove around downtown Washington, with Raymond’s operator as passenger, the conversation seemed disputatious.