With the blade, he pried the corner loose enough to get a grip on, set the knife down and very carefully pulled the sheet of paper free. It cracked off the canvas. As he finally freed it, there was a kind of soft, slipping sound: paper, sliding loose, fluting down to land with a rattle on the dirty floor. He set the backing down and bent there in the harsh light to see what secrets he had unlocked.
It was the last few sketches from Trig’s book. Bob began to shuffle through them, finding images of a campus building in Madison, Wisconsin, portraits of people at parties in Washington, crowd scenes of big demonstrations. There was a portrait of Donny. It must have been made about the time he did the scene of Donny and Julie, which Bob had seen in Vietnam. He brought those days vividly to life, and Bob began to feel his passion — and his pain.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
One man had gone ahead and returned with a report.
“He’s in there with a flashlight, reading some pages or something. I can’t figure it out.”
“Okay,” said Bonson. “I think I know what he’s got. Let’s finish this, once and for all.”
The guns came out. The team consisted now of five men besides Bonson. They were large men in crew cuts in their late forties. They were tough-looking, exuding that alpha-male confidence that suggested no difficulty in doing violence if necessary. They looked like large policemen, soldiers, firemen, extremely well developed, extremely competent. They drew the guns from under their jackets, and there was a little ceremony of clicks and snaps, as safeties came off and slides were eased back to check chambers, just in case. Then the suppressors were screwed on.
Bonson led them along the road, into the lot and up to the old grain warehouse. Above, stars pinwheeled and blinked. Water sounds filled the night, the lapping of the tides against ancient docks. From somewhere came a low, steady roar of automobiles. He reached the metal door and through the gap between it and the building proper, he could see Bob in the center of the room, sitting on a crate he’d gotten from somewhere, reading by the light of a flashlight. The painting was on the floor, somehow standing straight, as if on display, and Bob was leaning against a thick pillar that supported the low ceiling. Bonson could see that the image had somehow been destroyed, yielding a large white square in its center.
What is wrong with this picture, he asked himself.
He studied it for a second.
No, nothing. The man is unaware. The man is lost. The man is unprepared. The man is defenseless. The man is the ultimate soft target.
He nodded.
“Okay,” he whispered.
One of the men opened the door and he walked in.
Bob looked up to see them as their lights flashed on him.
“Howdy,” he said.
“Lights,” said Bonson.
One of the men walked away, found an electrical junction and the place leaped into light, which showed the rawness of industrial space, a gravel floor, the air filled with dust and agricultural vapors.
“Hello, Swagger,” said Bonson. “My, my, what’s that?”
“It’s the last sketches from Trig Carter’s book. Real damn interesting,” said Bob, loudly.
“How’d you find it?”
“What?”
What was wrong with his ears?
“I said, ‘How did you find it?’ ”
“When I thought about his last painting, I figured it, pretty close. The reason the painting was so different was his clue: his way of saying to those who came after him, ‘Look this over.’ But no one ever came. Not until me.”
“Nice work,” said Bonson. “What’s in it?”
“What?”
What was wrong with his ears?
“I said, ‘What’s in it?’ ”
“Oh. Just what you’d expect,” said Bob, still a bit loud. “People, places, things he ran into as he began to prepare his symbolic explosion of the math building. A couple of nice drawings of Donny.”
“Trig Carter was a traitor,” said Bonson.
“Yeah?” said Bob mildly. “Do tell.”
“Give it over here,” said Bonson.
“You don’t want to see the drawings, Bonson? They’re pretty damned interesting.”
“We’ll look at them. That’s enough.”
“Oh, it gits better. There’s a nice drawing of this Fitzpatrick. Damn, that boy could draw. It’s Pashin; everybody will be able to tell. That’s quite a find, eh? That’s proof, cold, solid dead-on proof the peace movement was infiltrated by elements of Soviet intelligence.”
“So what?” said Bonson. “That’s all gone and forgotten. It doesn’t matter.”
“Oh, no?” said Bob. “See, there’s someone else in the drawing. Poor Trig must have grown extremely suspicious, so one day, late, right after the big May Day mess, he followed Fitzpatrick. He watched him meet somebody. He did. He watched them deep in conversation. And he recorded it.”
Bob held it up, a folded piece of paper, the lines that were Pashin brilliantly clear.
Bob unfolded the rest of the drawing.
“See, Bonson, here’s the funny part,” said Bob, loudly. “There’s someone else here. It’s you.”
There was a moment of silence. Bonson’s eyes narrowed tightly, and then he relaxed, turned to his team and smiled. He almost had to laugh.
“Who are you, Bonson?” Swagger asked, more quietly now. “Really, I’d like to know. I had some ideas. I just couldn’t make no sense of them. But just tell me. Who are you? What are you? Are you a traitor? Are you a professional Soviet agent masquerading as an American? Are you some kind of cynic playing the sides against each other? Are you in it for the money? Who are you, Bonson?”
“Kill him?” asked one of the men on the team, holding up a suppressed Beretta.
“No,” said Bonson. “No, not yet. I want to see how far he’s gotten.”
“Finally it makes sense,” Bob said. “The great CIA mole. The big one they’ve been hunting all these years. Who makes a better mole than the head mole hunter? Pretty goddamned smart. But what’s the deal? Why did no one ever suspect you?”
He could sense that Bonson wanted to tell him. He had probably never told anyone, had repressed his reality so deep and imposed such discipline on himself that it was almost not real to him, except when it needed to be. But now at last, he had a chance to explain.
“The reason I was never suspected,” he said finally, “was because they recruited me. I never went to them. They offered me a job when I left the Navy, but I said no. I went to law school, I spent three years on Wall Street, they came after me three more times, and I always said no. Finally — God, it took some discipline — finally I said yes.”
“Why did they want you so much?”
“Because of the NIS prosecutions. That was the plan. I sent fifty-seven young men to Vietnam, Marines, naval seaman, even a couple of junior officers. I reported on dozens more that I turned up in the other services, and many of them went, too. There was never a better secret policeman anywhere, one with less mercy and more ambition. They could see how fierce I was. I was so good. I was astonishing. They wanted me so bad it almost killed them, and I played so hard to get it still amazes me. But that was our plan from the beginning.”
His face gleamed with vanity and pride. This was his great triumph, the core of his life, what made him better than other men, his work of art.
“Who are you, Bonson? Who the fuck are you?”