Black Market (24 page)

When Stemkowsky finally spoke, he was almost incoherent; incomprehensible words squirmed through his gummy, swollen lips. His tongue felt at least twice its normal size.

“Ga fuh-fuh-fuck yrrself. Fuh-fuck yrrself.”

“Oh, please. Your time for being morally indignant is long past… All right, then…look at what we have here. Look at this.”

Monserrat's hands were holding out a brown paper shopping bag. From it, he took out a familiar blue cooking pot.

Harry Stemkowsky screamed! He fought insanely against his bonds, forcing them to rip into his skin. Up close to his eyes, a fork dipped slowly into the depths of the pot. The fork speared a dripping chunk of beef bourguignonne that oozed brown gravy.

Stemkowsky screamed. He screamed again and again.

“It seems you guessed my little secret. You should also know by now how deadly serious this interrogation is. How important this is to me.” Monserrat turned to his lieutenants.

“Bring in the unfortunate cook.”

Harry Stemkowsky recognized Mary, but only slightly. She was such a pitiful caricature of her former self. Her face was badly bruised, purplish, and raw. Her bloated mouth opened crookedly as she saw Harry. Some of her front teeth were missing; her swollen gums were pulpy and bloody.

“Puh-puh-pleez?” Stemkowsky struggled; he lifted the chair legs right off the floor with his tremendous arm strength. “
She don know.
”

“I know that. Mary doesn't know how you came to possess stolen stock market bonds in Beirut, then in Tel Aviv.
You
know, though.”

“Pleeze. Don-don-don hur' her…”

“I don't want to hurt her. So you tell me what you know, Sergeant. Everything that you know. You tell me right now. How did you get the stolen stock market bonds?”

Once again, that horrible smile from Monserrat.

It took another excessively cruel and gruesome fifteen minutes to get the information, to find out
some
, not all, of what Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky knew…

Information about the stolen bonds and Wall Street securities; about the bombing on December 4. Not where Colonel Hudson was right now. Not even precisely who the Vets leader was. But a start, a beginning, at least. And a beginning was better than what Monserrat had been accustomed to recently.

François Monserrat stared down at a crippled Harry Stemkowsky and his wife. From Stemkowsky's perspective the terrorist leader seemed to be looking right through them, as if they were both totally insubstantial. The look on Monserrat's face was almost inhuman, frightening, sickening.

“You see now? None of your pain and none of poor Mary's suffering were necessary. It could have been five minutes of talking together, at most. Now, how's this for just rewards?”

A compact black Beretta appeared, paused so that the Stemkowskys could see what was coming, then fired twice.

The very last thing U.S. Army Sergeant Harry Stemkowsky ever thought was that he and Mary never got to enjoy their money. Over a million dollars, which he'd earned. It wasn't fair. Life wasn't ever fair, was it?

That night Arch Carroll went to his home in Riverdale. As he trudged up from the floodlit clapboard garage, the ground around him seemed to be spinning.

He climbed the creaky porch steps. Twinges of guilt struck painfully hard. He'd been neglecting the kids for too long this time.

Only the night-light was on downstairs. There was the soft electric buzz of kitchen appliances. Carroll took off his shoes and tiptoed upstairs.

He stopped and peeked inside the front bedroom where Elizabeth, AKA Lizzie, bunked with Mickey Kevin. Their tiny baby figures were delicately sprawled across twin beds.

He remembered buying the beds years before, at Klein's on Fourteenth Street. Just look at the little creepolas. Not a problem, not a care in the world. Life as it ought to be.

An ancient Buster Brown clock from Carroll's own childhood glowed and clicked softly on the far wall. It was next to posters of Def Leppard and the Police. Strange world for a little kid to grow up in.

Strange world for the big kids, too.

“Hi, you guys,” he whispered too low to be heard. “Your old dad's home from the salt mines.”

“Everybody's just fine, Archer,” Mary K. said.

“You scared the living shit out of me, Mary. I never heard you come in.”

“They understand all the problems you're having. We've been watching the news.”

Mary K. gave her big brother a hug. She'd been seventeen the year both their parents had died in Florida. Carroll had brought her up after that. He and Nora had always been around to talk to her about her boyfriends-about Mary Katherine wanting to be a serious painter, even if she couldn't make any decent money at it. They'd been there when she needed them, and now it was the other way around.

“Maybe they understand okay about my work. How about the other things? Caitlin?” Carroll's head turned slowly toward his sister.

Mary K. took his arm and draped it over her shoulder. She was such a softie, such a sweet, gentle, and good lady. It was time she found someone as terrific as she was, Carroll often thought. Probably she wasn't helping her cause, living with him and the kids.

“They trust your parental judgment. Within reasonable bounds, of course.”

“That's news.”

“Oh, you're the Word and the Light to them, and you know it. If you say they'll like Caitlin, they instinctively believe it-because you said it, Arch.”

“Well, they didn't show it the other morning. I
think
they'll like her. She's a terrific person.”

“I'm sure she is. You have good instincts about people. You always knew which of my beaux was worth a second look. You're a sucker for people who are full of life, full of love for other people. That's what Caitlin's like, isn't she?”

Arch Carroll looked down at his baby sister and shook his head gently. He grinned. Mary K. was so smart. She had an artist's sensibility, but she was so practical. A curious combination, and irresistible in his opinion.

Carroll stretched his arms. The wound, that souvenir of a morning in France, still ached. “One day soon I'm going to take a week off. I swear it. I've got to get back in touch with the kids.”

“What about your friend, Caitlin? Could
she
take a week off, too?”

Carroll said nothing. He wasn't sure if that was such a good idea. He went off to bed, where he lay exhausted but unable to fall over the edge into sleep. The computer screens at 13 Wall were still running through his mind, perplexing images. If there was any one avenue he could follow in the trail of Green Band, it would lead inevitably to Washington and deeper into the restricted files of the FBI.

Arch Carroll snored quietly, slept dreamlessly, and when his bedside alarm went off, it was just before dawn and still dark.

Washington, D.C.

Washington, Carroll had always thought, was the ultimate Hitchcock movie location: so elegant, so quietly lovely and distinguished, yet paranoiac in all of its twisting, changing forms.

At 9:00 A.M. he squirmed out of a faded blue cab with a badly dented fender. His face was immediately slapped with raw cold and drizzle on Washington 's Tenth Street. He hiked up his jacket collar. He squinted through the thick, soupy morning haze that obscured the concrete box that was the J. Edgar Hoover Building.

Once inside, he found the procedure at the escort desk mechanical and unnecessarily slow. It irritated him. The Bureau's famous procedures, the inefficiency they created, played like a mocking skit appropriate for “Saturday Night Live.”

After several minutes of serious and pompous phone checks, he was granted a coded blue tag with the FBI's official insignia. He slid the plastic card into a metal entry gate and passed inside the hallowed halls.

An attractive woman agent, a researcher for FBI Data Analysis, was sitting outside the elevator on the fifth floor. She wore a man-tailored suit; her chestnut hair was wound back in a tight, formal chignon.

“Hello, I'm Arch Carroll.”

“I'm Samantha Hawes. People
don't
call me Sam. Nice to meet you. Why don't you come this way, please.”

She started to walk away, pleasant but efficient. “I've already collected as much material as I can for you to look at. When you told me what you were fishing for, I put in some hours of overtime. My material comes from the Pentagon and from our own classified files. Everything I could collect this quickly on your lists of names. It wasn't easy, I must say. Some of it I transcribed from material already on computer file. The rest-as you can smell-is contained in some really musty documents.”

Samantha Hawes escorted Carroll to a library-style carrel beside a silent row of gray metal copiers. The desk was completely covered with thick stacks of reports.

Carroll nearly groaned as he gazed at the mountainous stacks. Each report looked like every other. How was he supposed to find something unusual in this yawning heap of history?

He walked around the table, sizing up his task. Hidden among all the folders were connections between men-the tracks, the spoor they laid down; the events they lived through during and after Vietnam. Somewhere, surely, tracks would have crisscrossed, correspondences would have been made, relationships established.

“I have more. Do you want to see them now? Or is this enough to hold you for a while?” Samantha Hawes asked.

“Oh, I think this will do me pretty well. I didn't know we collected this much dirt on everybody down here.”

Agent Hawes grinned. “You should see your file.”

“Did you?”

“I'll be back over there, working in the stacks. You just holler if you need any more light reading, Mr. Carroll.”

The FBI agent started to turn away, then, suddenly, she turned back. Samantha Hawes
seemed
to be a very contemporary woman, very pretty, very confident, and genteel southern, from her looks, anyway. Carroll couldn't help thinking that in days of old she would already have been a young mother of two or three, tucked away in Alexandria.

“There
is
something else.” She looked concerned. “I don't know exactly what this all means. Maybe it's just me. But when I went through these files yesterday evening… I had the distinct feeling that some of them had been tampered with.”

A small, very unpleasant warning bell rang in Arch Carroll's head. “Who would tamper with them?”

Samantha Hawes shook her head. “Any number of people have access to them.”

“What do you mean when you say they've been tampered with.”

“I mean that I think documents are missing from certain files.”

Carroll reached out and grasped her wrist lightly. The information excited him. It meant that certain files, in some ways, were important to someone. Someone else had looked at them. Someone had possibly pilfered some of the documents.

Why? Which files?

He saw a strange look cross her face, as if she were asking herself about the precise nature of this unorthodox man who'd been admitted to FBI headquarters.

“Can you remember which files?”

“Of course I can.” She moved toward the worktable and began sifting. She picked out five thick files, dropping them in front of Carroll. “This one… and this… this one… this one.”

He gazed quickly at the names on the files.

Scully, Richard

Demunn, Michael

Freedman, Harold Lee

Melindez, Paul

Hudson, David

Why these five?” he asked.

“They served together in Vietnam, according to their documents. That's one good reason.”

Carroll sat down. He still expected to come away from Washington empty-handed. He expected that the faint sense of anticipation he now felt would turn out to be nothing more than a false alarm. Five men on the FBI computer list of “subversives”-a term he knew was next to meaningless, at least the way the FBI used it.

He checked his own printouts, and his heart began to beat rapidly.

Scully and Demunn had been explosives experts.

And David Hudson had been a colonel, who, according to the brief note on the printout, had been active in the organization of veterans groups and veterans rights after Vietnam.

Five men who had served together in the war.

Five men who were on his list and the FBI's
.

He slipped off his jacket and then the tie he'd worn especially for his big trip to Washington. He began to read about Colonel David Hudson.

Washington, D.C.

When he had finished reading, Arch Carroll softly shook his head.

U.S. Army Colonel David Hudson's thick 211 file, his entire life in the military, was spread out on the desk before him.

Colonel David Hudson was the final enigma
.

David Hudson's military career had begun with high promise at West Point, where he'd been an honor graduate in 1966. He'd been a four-year member, and finally captain, of the tennis team. He was also a popular cadet, according to the available reports-a modern-day version of the all-American boy.

It got even better. David Hudson had subsequently volunteered for Special Forces “Q” courses, followed by special Ranger training. On a first impression, at least, the army couldn't have asked for a more diligent or professional young soldier.

Colonel David Hudson: all-American boy.

Every succeeding report Carroll read was highlighted and underscored with phrases like “one of our very best”; “the kind of young officer who should make us all proud”; “a model soldier in every way”; “unbridled, absolutely infectious enthusiasm”; “definitely one of our future leaders”; “the kind of material we can build the modern Army around.”

In Vietnam Hudson had been awarded the Medal of Honor and the Distinguished Service Cross during his first tour. He had been captured and transported into North Vietnam for interrogation. He'd spent seven months as a POW. Apparently he'd almost died in the prison camp… He had then volunteered for a second tour and performed with “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity” on several occasions.

Then, three months before the evacuation of Saigon, he'd been savagely wounded by a Vietcong grenade blast and subsequently lost his left arm. Hudson had reacted with characteristic bravura.

A hospital report read: “Colonel David Hudson has been a godsend, helping other patients, never seeming to feel sorry for himself… In every way, a thoroughly idealistic young man.”

Following Vietnam, though, quite suddenly after his return to the United States, Colonel David Hudson's career, his entire life, became disturbingly unhinged. According to the files, the change was bewildering to his friends and family.

“It was almost as if a different man had returned from the war.” His father was interviewed and quoted several times. “The fire, that wonderful, contagious enthusiasm, was burned out of David's eyes. His eyes were those of a very old man.”

Colonel David Hudson: enigma, almost phantom, after coming home from the Vietnam War.

Hudson was stationed first at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, then at Fort Sill in Oklahoma. At Fort Polk in Louisiana, Hudson was quietly disciplined for “activities detrimental to the Army.” Another report indicated that he was transferred twice within three months, for what seemed on the surface to be petty insubordinations… His marriage to Betsy Hinson, his hometown sweetheart, ended abruptly in 1973. Betsy Hinson said, “I don't even know David anymore. He's not the same man I married. David's become a stranger to everyone who knows him.”

Hudson, in the postwar years, had become almost obsessive about his participation in a handful of Vietnam veterans organizations. As an organizer and spokesman at rallies around the country, Hudson had met and been photographed with liberal motion picture stars, with sympathetic big-business leaders, with recognizable national politicians.

At one point during the morning, Arch Carroll meticulously laid out Xerox copies of every available photo of David Hudson.

He rearranged the pictures until he liked the pattern of his collage. One photo was stained with coffee or cola. The stain looked recent. Samantha Hawes? Someone else? Or was he just getting squirrely?

In the photographs, Colonel David Hudson looked like the classic, idealized military man of past decades. With his Jimmy Stewart wholesomeness, he looked the way American soldiers had been pictured in the years before Vietnam. He had short blond hair in almost all the war photographs, a tightly set, somewhat heroic jaw, a pinched, slightly uncomfortable smile that was disarming. Colonel David Hudson was clearly very sure of himself and what he was doing. He was obviously proud, fiercely proud, to be an American soldier.

Carroll got up from the mess of official papers and wandered around the research room. Okay-what did he have here?

A leader, a natural soldier, who somewhere along the way had fucked up royally. Or maybe Hudson had been royally fucked?

There were probably hundreds, maybe even thousands, of men like David Hudson across the country. Some of them went berserk and had to be removed to the “screaming floors” in VA hospitals. Others sat quietly in dingy, lonely rooms and ticked slowly like time bombs.

Colonel David Hudson?… Was he Green Band?

Samantha Hawes reappeared with a pot of coffee, deli sandwiches, and assorted salads on a tray. “Getting into it, I see.”

“Yes, it's something all right. Odd, and absolutely mesmerizing. Hard to figure, though.”

Carroll rubbed the palms of his hands in circles over his red-rimmed eyes. “Thanks for the food, especially the coffee. The whole file is extraordinary. Colonel Hudson, especially. He's a very complex, very strange man. He's too perfect. The perfect soldier. Then what? What happened to him after he returned to the States?”

Samantha Hawes sat down beside Carroll. She took a healthy bite of an overstuffed sandwich. “As I said, there are some peculiar gaps in his military records. In all of their records. Believe me, I look at enough of them to know.”

“What sort of peculiar gaps? What should be in there that isn't?”

“Well, there were no written reports on his special training at Fort Bragg, for example. There was nothing on his ‘Q’ or his Ranger training. There was almost nothing on his time as a POW. Those should all be in there. Marked highly confidential if need be, but definitely there in the file.”

“What else is missing? Would there be photostated copies or originals anywhere else?”

“There should definitely be more psychological profiles. More reports after he lost his arm in Vietnam. There's very little on that. He was tortured by the Vietcong. He apparently still has flashbacks. All the backup data on his POW experience is conveniently missing. I've never seen a two eleven file without a complete psych workup, either.”

Carroll selected a second roast beef sandwich half. “Maybe Hudson took them out himself?”

“I don't know how he could get in here, but it makes as much sense as anything else I read yesterday.”

“Like? Please keep going, Samantha.”

“Like the way they made him a cipher right after Vietnam. He had very high-level intelligence clearance in Southeast Asia. He was a heavy commander in Vietnam. Why would they give him such a nothing post back in the States? The arm? Then why not write it up that way?”

“Maybe that's why he ultimately quit the service,” Carroll suggested. “The second-rate assignments once he got back home.”

“Maybe. But why did they do it to him in the first place?… They were grooming David Hudson before he came home. Believe me, they had serious plans for him. You can see tracks to glory all over those files. In the early years, anyway. Hudson was a real star.”

Carroll jotted down a few notes. “What would a more predictable assignment have been? Once he was back in the States? If he was still on the fast track?”

“At the very least he should have gotten the Pentagon. According to his records, he was on an extremely fast track. Until the disciplinary problems, anyway. He got bush-league assignments before he did anything to deserve them.”

“It doesn't make sense. Maybe they'll know something at the Pentagon. That's my next stop.”

Samantha Hawes extended her hand. “My sincere condolences. The Pentagon makes this austere place seem like a hippie commune.”

“I've heard they're a party group.” Carroll smiled back at Agent Hawes. She was smart, and he liked her.

“Listen,” she said. “There is something else you should know. One other person definitely went through the two eleven files in the past two weeks. On the fifth of December, actually.”

Carroll stopped packing up and stared at Samantha Hawes. “Who?” he asked.

“On that day, certain two eleven files were ordered over to the White House. Vice President Elliot wanted to see them. He kept the files for more than six hours. Listen, Carroll. You come back here if you need any more help. Officially or otherwise… Promise?”

“I promise,” Carroll said, and absolutely meant it.

Riverdale, New York City

The young Carroll boy had his marching orders, really strict orders, too.

Six-year-old Mickey Kevin Carroll had been allowed to walk the three blocks home from CYO basketball practice since the second month of the school year. He had very precise orders for the walk, which his Aunt Mary K. made him write out in his composition notepad:

Look both ways at Churchill Avenue.

Look both ways at Grand Street.

Don't talk to strangers for any reason at all.

Don't stop at the Fieldstone store before supper.

If you do, it's instant death by torture.

Mickey Kevin was pondering the confusing mechanics of the basketball lay-up as he covered the long double block between Riverdale Avenue and Churchill Avenue. Brother Alexander Joseph had made it look kind of easy. Except when Mickey tried it himself, there were just too many things to remember, all practically at once. Somehow your leg and your arm had to come up; then you had to throw the ball perfectly into the high, high hoop. All at the same time.

As he rehearsed the confusing sport's primary action, Mickey Kevin gradually became aware of footsteps growing louder behind him.

He turned and saw a man. The man was walking his way. Walking pretty fast.

Mickey Kevin's body tightened. TV movies and stuff like that made you scared when you were alone. Somebody was always out to get the little kid or the baby-sitter all alone at home. It was a pretty creepy world. Some of the people out there were unbelievably creepy.

The man walking behind him looked pretty normal, Mickey guessed, but he decided to hurry it up a little anyway. Without looking too obvious, he started to take longer steps, faster steps. He walked the way he always did when he was trying to keep up with his dad.

There weren't any cars or anything at the corner of Grand Street. Mickey stopped according to the rules, anyway. He looked both ways.

He looked back then-and the man was really close. Really, really close.

Mickey Kevin
ran
across Grand Street, and Aunt Mary K. would have killed him on the spot. His heart was pounding now. Really thumping out loud. Right down into his shoes, he could fell his heartbeat.

Then Mickey Kevin did the really, really dumb thing. He knew it the second he did it. The instant!

He cut through the empty lot at the Riverdale Day School.

There were all of these tricky bushes and stuff back there. Everybody left empty beer cans and broken wine and liquor bottles. Mary K. had forgotten to put that on the list: Don't cut through the Riverdale Day School lot. It was too obvious for words.

Mickey pushed the prickly bushes out of his way, and he thought he heard the man coming through the lot behind him. Crashing through the lot. He wasn't completely sure. He'd have to stop walking to listen so he could tell. He decided to just keep running, to run like hell.

Full speed ahead now. As fast as he could, with all the dark, thorny bushes, the hidden rocks and roots trying to trip him.

Mickey Kevin stumbled forward, his feet seeming to catch in dirt holes. He glided over slippery leaves. He nicked a rock and almost went over headfirst. He was panting now, his breath was too loud in his own ears, his footsteps were echoing like gunshots.

The back of his house suddenly appeared: the glowing amber porch lights, the familiar gray outline against the darker blackness of the night.

He had never been so glad to see home.

Fingers touched the side of his cheek, and Mickey yelled out, “Hey!”

A stupid tree branch!

He almost had a heart attack. Mickey ran across the last icy patch of back lawn. He ran like a midget halfback bound for seven. Halfway there, his metal lunch box popped open. It just about exploded-an orange, rolled-up papers, and a thermos tumbled out.

Mickey Kevin dropped the lunch box. He crashed up the back steps and put his hand on the cold metal storm door.

And then…

Mickey Kevin turned. He had to look back.

His chest was pounding nonstop now.
Ka-chunk, ka-chunk
, like a huge machine was inside there. Making ice or something equally noisy. He had to look back.

Oh, brother!
Oh boy, oh boy!

Nobody was behind him.

Nobody!

It was completely quiet in the backyard. Nothing moved. His lunch box lay in the middle of the snow. It glowed a little in the dark.

Mickey squinted real hard. He was feeling pretty stupid now. He'd made it all up; he was almost sure of it… But he still wasn't going to go back and pick up his lunch box. Maybe in the morning. Maybe in the spring sometime.

What a little baby! Afraid of the dark! He finally went in the house.

Mary K. was in the kitchen dicing vegetables with a big knife on the butcher block. The TV was turned on to “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”

“How was practice, Mickey Mouse? You look beat up. Wash, huh? Dinner's almost ready. I said-how was your basketball practice, fella?”

“Oh, uh… I don't know how to do a stupid lay-up. It was okay.”

Then Mickey Kevin smoothly disappeared, slid like a shadow into the downstairs bathroom. He didn't wash his hands and face, though, and he didn't turn on the overhead light.

Very slowly, he lifted a handful of lace curtain. He stared out into the dark, very creepola backyard, squinting his eyes tightly again.

He still couldn't see anybody.

The stupid cat, their stupid cat Mortimer, was playing with his lunch box. There was nobody else. Nobody had really chased him, he was suddenly sure.

But Mickey Kevin couldn't see the real-life bogeyman watching the Carroll house from the darkened back lot. He couldn't see the fearsome Sten machine pistol or the man holding it, fingering it so expertly.