«You did?… Not only was he the greatest linebacker in the NFL, but he broke the stereotype of—shall we say, the overly cautious Jewish male. He was a lion of Judea, the terror of the defense—on a par with Moshe Dayan on the American football field!»
«He was also a crook—»
«Spare me! He was my hero of the hour, a symbol for all of us—the highly intelligent muscular giant who made us proud… What do you mean, he was a crook?»
«Well, he’s never actually been indicted—close, but no arraignments—but then there are reasons for that, too.»
«Indictments, reasons? What are you talking about?»
«He does a lot of work—not exactly officially—for the government. For a fact, I kinda started him off in that department, for the army, actually.»
«Will you please make sense, General?»
«In a short-shell casing, we had some fat, loose lips regarding certain weapons specifications that we couldn’t uncover, even though we knew where the leaks were coming from. I ran across Goldfarb, who was setting up a consulting business on security measures—hell, a picture of him in an undershirt would scare the shit out of Godzilla—and told him to get to work on the problem. You might say that he and his troops go where the Inspector General’s office wouldn’t get near.»
«General, what has Hyman Goldfarb got to do with the silence that has followed your incredible brief when there should be pandemonium?»
«Well, as these things happen in Dizzy City, one thing led to another for the Hurricane. I mean, his reputation spread like a brushfire started with flamethrowers, and before you could sit shiva, everybody in town wanted his services—especially against one another. His list of government agency clients reads like the who’s who and what’s what around the Potomac. He’s got a lot of powerful friends who wouldn’t admit they ever heard of him if you plucked their short hairs with a pair of pliers. Squashing indictments are his for raising an eyebrow… You see, that’s when I really knew we might be close to pay dirt.»
«Pay dirt…?» Aaron shook his head back and forth as though trying to stop the clanging cymbals inside his skull. «May I ask for clarification?» he pleaded.
«His people came after me, Commander Pinkus. It was an ambush, the objective capture and silence—I read ’em like a book.»
«Capture … silence, a book? They came after you …?»
«After the Wopotami brief was filed—long after! Which has to mean the brief’s being taken seriously but the news is being kept under the ponchos because the beltway’s about to spiral up to the moon. So what do they do in the meantime? They hire Hymie the Hurricane to solve their problem. Search, capture, and destroy! Read ’em like a book.»
«But, General, the lower judiciary, with its caseloads and backlogs and …» Once again, Aaron Pinkus’s expression froze as his words trailed off into audible vapor. «Oh, dear God, it wasn’t …? It wasn’t.»
«You know the rules, Commander. A plaintiff suing the state has direct access, dependent only on the validity of argument.»
«No … no, you couldn’t have!»
«I’m afraid I did. A little outside persuasion on a couple of sensitive law clerks and we went right up to the big legal bathtub.»
«What bathtub?» shouted a totally confounded Devereaux. «What kind of crap is this moral degenerate trying to sell?»
«I fear he may have sold it to someone else,» said Aaron, his voice faint. «He’s taken this brilliantly evolved brief—based on materials stolen from the sealed archives—directly to the Supreme Court.»
«You’ve got to be kidding!»
«For everyone’s sake, I wish I were.» Pinkus abruptly found his voice and his posture. «Now, however, we can plumb the depths of this insanity. Who’s the attorney-of-record for the plaintiffs, General? A simple phone call will reveal the name.»
«I’m not sure it will, Commander.»
«What?»
«It just got there this morning.»
«This morning …?»
«Well, you see, there was this Indian brave who fed me misinformation, which is different from disinformation, regarding a little matter of a bar exam—»
«Just answer my question, General! The attorney-of-record, if you please!»
«Him,» replied the Hawk, pointing at Sam Devereaux.
9
Vincent Francis Assisi Mangecavallo, known in certain select circles as Vinnie the Bam-Bam, and also as code Ragu, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, paced his office in Langley, Virginia, a perplexed, frustrated man. He had heard nothing! What could have gone wrong? The plan was so simple, so flawless, so airtight. A equals B equals C, therefore A equals C, but somewhere within that simple equation, Hyman Goldfarb and his people had lost their marbles and Vincent’s own man, the best and most innocuous shadow in the business, had only managed to get lost! Big Foot! The Abominable Snowman! What the hell was wrong with the Hurricane? Who had chewed up his well-advertised brains? And where was that miserable slime Vincent had rescued from a not-so-small debt in Vegas and put on a respectable government payroll, telling the casino boys to lose the slime’s markers in the interests of national security? Gone, that’s where he was! But why?
Little Joey the Shroud had been overjoyed to hear from his big-shot friend from the old days, when they all used Little Joey to tail the deadbeats from the Brooklyn docks to the fancy clubs in Manhattan—and Joey was good! He could stand alone by himself in the middle of Yankee Stadium and no one would notice him even if every seat in the place was sold out. Nobody ever noticed Little Joey the Shroud; he just faded into the wallpaper as fast as he did in a crowd on the subway. It was a talent he had, like total insignificance—even his face was sort of gray and nondescript… So where the hell was he? He had to know he was better off with his old friend Vincent than without his big Washington connection—after all, the markers could be reinstated and the casino tuxedos would come after him again. It didn’t make sense—nothing made sense!
The telephone rang, the telephone hidden in the lower right-hand drawer of the director’s desk. Mangecavallo ran to it; he had installed that line himself, at night, and with professionals far more experienced than the so-called experts in the Agency’s department of clandestine communications. In fact, no one in the government had the number; it was limited to really important people who got things done. «Yes?» barked the DCI.
«It’s Little Joey, Bam-Bam,» said the piping voice on the telephone.
«Where the hell have you been? Thirty-six hours, maybe a day and a half, I don’t hear from you!»
«Because for every minute of that time I been spinning my head and racing my ass from one fuckin’ place to another keeping up with a zuccone!»
«What are you talkin’?»
«Also you told me not to call you at home, which number I ain’t got, and definitely not through the big spy joint’s switchboard, right?»
«Yeah, right. So?»
«So between airplanes and hustling airline clerks and paying off taxi drivers ready to spit in my face, and bribing a retired cop who once put a collar on me to do a little checking with his old buddies in the black-and-whites to find a certain stretch limo with a funny license plate, I ain’t had a hell of a lot of free time!»