Carrion Comfort (39 page)

“Chevy Chase?” I said. “Huh?” Vincent squinted at me. “The suburb. Perhaps it is Chevy Chase?”

He shook his head. “Bethesda? Silver Spring? Takoma Park?”

Vincent furrowed his brow as if considering these. He was about to speak when I interrupted. “Oh, I know,” I said. “If your uncle is rich, he probably lives in Bel Air. Isn’t that right?”

“Yeah, that’s it,” agreed Vincent, relieved. “That’s the place.”

I nodded. My toast and tea arrived. Vincent’s eggs and sausage and hash browns and ham and waffles were set in front of him. We ate in silence broken only by his feeding noises.

Past Durham, I-85 turned due north again. We crossed into Virginia a little over an hour after we finished breakfast. When I was a girl my family often had traveled to Virginia to visit friends and relatives. Usually we had taken the train, but my favorite method of travel had been the small but comfortable overnight packet ship which had docked at Newport News. Now I found myself driving an oversized and underpowered Buick north on a four-lane highway, listening to gospel music on the FM radio and leaving my window down a crack to dispel the sweat and dried-urine smell emanating from my sleeping passenger.

We had passed Richmond and it was late afternoon when Vincent awoke. I asked him if he would like to drive for a spell. My arms and legs ached from the strain of keeping up with the traffic. No one obeyed the 55 m.p.h. speed limit. My eyes were also tired.

“Hey, yeah. I mean, you sure?” asked Vincent. “Yes,” I said. “You will drive carefully, I presume.”

“Yeah, sure.”

I found a rest area where we could exchange places. Vincent drove at a steady 68 m.p.h. with only his wrist on the wheel, his eyes so heavy-lidded that for a moment I feared that he had fallen asleep. I reassured myself by remembering that modern automobiles are simple enough to be driven by chimpanzees. I adjusted my seat as far back into a reclining position as it would go and closed my eyes. “Wake me when we arrive at Arlington, would you please, Vincent?”

He grunted. I had set my purse between the two front seats and I knew that Vincent was glancing at it. He had not been able to hood his eyes quickly enough when I had removed the thick pile of cash to pay for breakfast. I was taking a chance by napping, but I was very tired. A Washington FM station was playing a Bach concerto. The hum of tires and gentle swish of traffic lulled me to sleep in less than a minute.

The absence of motion woke me. I came awake instantly, totally, alertly— the way a predator awakes at the approach of its prey.

We were parked in an unfinished rest stop. The evening slant of winter sunlight suggested that I had been asleep for about an hour. The heavy traffic suggested that we were close to Washington. The switchblade knife in Vincent’s hand suggested darker things. He looked up from counting my traveler’s checks. I impassively returned his stare.

“You gotta sign these,” he whispered.

I stared at him. “You gotta sign these fuckin’ things over to me,” hissed my hitchhiker. His hair fell in his eyes and he flipped it out. “You gotta sign ’em
now.
”

“No.”

Vincent’s eyes widened with surprise. Spittle wet his thin lips. He would have killed me then, I believe, in broad daylight, with heavy traffic passing twenty yards away, and with nowhere to put an old lady’s corpse except the Potomac, but— and even dear, dull Vincent was capable of comprehending this— he needed my signature on the checks.

“Listen, you old cunt,” he said and seized the front of my dress, “you sign these fucking checks or I’ll cut your fucking nose off your fucking face. You unnerstand me,
cunt
?” He brought the steel blade to a stop inches in front of my eyes.

I glanced down at the grimy hand holding my dress front and I sighed. For the briefest of seconds I recalled entering my hotel suite three decades earlier, in a different country, in a different world, and finding a bald but handsome gentleman in evening dress going through my jewel case.
That
thief had smiled ironically and given a short bow when discovered. I would miss that grace, the ease of Use, the quiet efficiency which no amount of conditioning could impart.

“Come
on
,” hissed the filthy youth holding me. He moved the blade toward my cheek. “You’re fucking asking for this,” said Vincent. There was a gleam in his eyes that had nothing to do with the money.

“Yes,” I said. His arm stopped in mid-motion. For several seconds he strained until the veins stood out on his forehead. He grimaced and his eyes widened as his hand tilted, turned, and moved the stiletto blade back toward his own face.

“Time to start,” I said softly.

The razor-sharp blade turned until it was vertical. It slid between the thin lips, between the stained and broken front teeth.

“Time to teach,” I said softly.

The blade slid in, slicing gums and tongue. His lips curled back and then closed on steel. The blade grew moist with blood as the tip touched soft palate.

“Time to learn.” I smiled and we began the first lesson.

S
aul Laski stood motionless for twenty minutes looking at the girl. She stared back, unblinking, equally motionless, frozen in time. She wore a straw hat, tilted back slightly on her head, and a gray apron over a simple white shift. Her hair was blond, and her eyes blue. Her hands were folded in front of her, arms stretched in the awkward grace of childhood.

Someone stepped between him and the painting and Saul stepped back, moved sideways to get a better view. The girl in the straw hat continued to stare at the empty space he had vacated. Saul did not know why the painting moved him so; most of Marie Cassat’s work struck him as too sentimental, a soft-edged blur of pastels, but this piece had moved him to tears the first time he had visited the National Gallery almost two decades ago and now no trip to Washington was complete without a pilgrimage to the “Girl With the Straw Hat.” He thought that perhaps somehow the pudgy face and wistful stare brought back the presence of his sister Stefa— dead of typhus during the war— although Stefa’s hair had been much darker and her eyes far from blue.

Saul turned away from the painting. Each time he visited the museum he promised himself that he would see new sections, spend more time with the modern work, and each time he spent too much time here with the girl. Next time, he thought.

It was after one
P.M.
and the crowd in the gallery restaurant was thinning out by the time Saul reached the entrance and stood there scanning the tables. He saw Aaron immediately, seated at a small table near the corner, his back to a tall potted plant. Saul waved, and joined the young man.

“Hello, Uncle Saul.”

“Hello, Aaron.”

His nephew rose and gave Saul a hug. Saul grinned, gripped the boy by the arms, and looked at him. No boy now. Aaron would be twenty-six in March. No longer a boy perhaps, but still thin, and Saul saw David’s smile, the upward curve of muscle at each corner of the mouth, but Rebecca’s dark curls and large eyes looked out from behind the glasses. But something about the darker skin and high cheeks were David’s alone, as if an additional inheritance for being sabra, a native-born Israeli. Aaron and his twin had been thirteen, small for their age, when the Six Day War had erupted. Saul had flown into Tel Aviv five hours too late to join the fighting even as a medic, but not too late to hear young Aaron and Isaac tell and retell the secondhand exploits of their older brother, Avner, a captain in the air force. And Saul had listened to additional details of Aaron and Isaac’s cousin Chaim’s bravery in leading his battalion on the Golan Heights. Two years later young Avner was dead, shot down by an Egyptian SAM during the War of Attrition, and the following August it was Chaim’s turn to die, a victim of a misplaced Israeli mine field during the Yom Kippur War. Aaron had been eighteen that summer, frail from the asthma that had afflicted him from infancy. David, his father, foiled every scheme Aaron came up with to enter the fray.

Aaron had his heart set on being a commando or paratrooper like his brother Isaac. When all of the ser vices rejected him because of his asthma and poor vision, the boy finished college and then played his final card. Aaron approached his father and asked David . . . pleaded with David . . . to use his old contacts in the nation’s intelligence ser vice to find him a position. Aaron entered the Mossad in June of 1974.

He was not trained as a field agent; Israel had too many ex-commandos and other heroes serving in the Mossad to need to put this slight, cerebral young man always hovering on the edge of ill health, in such a demanding role. Aaron did receive the standard training in self-defense and weapons’ handling, even becoming minimally proficient in using the little .22 Berettas favored by the Mossad at the time, but his real skill had been at cryptography. After three years working at communications in Tel Aviv and another year in the field somewhere in the Sinai, Aaron had come to Washington to work with a task force at the Israeli Embassy. The fact that he was David Eshkol’s son had not hurt the chances for such a choice appointment.

“How are you, Uncle Saul?” Aaron asked in Hebrew. “Well,” said Saul. “Speak English please.”

“All right.” There was no hint of accent. “How are your father and brother?”

“Better even than the last time we spoke,” said Aaron. “The doctors think that Father will be able to spend some time at the farm this summer. Isaac has been promoted to colonel.”

“Good, good,” said Saul. He glanced down at the three dossiers his nephew had set out on the table. He was trying to think of a way to reverse events so that he had never involved the boy, while still getting what ever information Aaron had been able to obtain.

As if reading his mind, Aaron leaned forward and said in an urgent whisper, “Uncle Saul,
what
are you involved in here?”

Saul blinked. Six days ago he had called Aaron and asked him if he could get any information on William Borden or the whereabouts of Francis Harrington. It had been a stupid thing to do; for many years Saul had avoided going to family or the family’s connections, but he had been distraught at the thought of young Harrington’s disappearance and desperate that if he went to Charleston, he would miss some crucial bit of information about Borden— about the Oberst. Aaron had called him back on a secure telephone and said, “Uncle Saul, this is about your German colonel, isn’t it?” Saul had not denied it. Everyone in the family had known of Uncle Saul’s obsession with an elusive Nazi encountered in the camps during the war. “You know the Mossad would never operate in the United States, don’t you?” Aaron had added. Saul had said nothing to that and his silence had said everything. He had worked with Aaron’s father when the Irgun Zvai Leumi and Haganah were illegal and active, buying American armaments and armaments
factories
to be shipped piece by piece to Palestine, to be reassembled and ready when the Arab armies inevitably rolled across the borders of the newborn Zionist state. “All right,” Aaron had responded to the silence, “I will do what I can.”

Saul blinked again and took off his glasses to wipe them with a napkin. “
Nu
, what do you mean?” he said. “I was curious about the man Borden. Francis was once a student of mine. He went to Los Angeles to find something out about this man. Probably divorce work, who knows? When Francis did not return on time and Mr. Borden is said to have died, I was asked by a friend, could I help? I thought of you, Aaron.”

“Uh-huh,” said Aaron. He stared steadily at his uncle, shook his head at last, and sighed. He looked to make sure that no one was in earshot or close enough to see past Saul’s back. Then he opened the first dossier. “I flew out to Los Angeles on Monday,” Aaron said.

“You did!” Saul was startled. He had meant for his nephew to make a few phone calls in Washington, to use what ever sophisticated computers the Israeli Embassy had these days— especially the office that housed the six Mossad agents— and perhaps even to look into Israeli or American classified files. He did
not
expect the boy to fly off to the West Coast the next day.

Aaron made a gesture with his hand. “It was no trouble,” he said. “I had weeks of leave accumulated. Since when have you ever asked anything of us, Uncle Saul? Always it had been give and give and give from you, since I was a child. The money from New York put me through the university at Haifa even though we could have afforded it. So when you ask one little thing, I shouldn’t do it?”

Saul rubbed his forehead. “You’re no James Bond, Moddy,” he said, using Aaron’s childhood nickname. “Besides, the Mossad does not operate in the States.”

Aaron did not react. “It was a vacation, Uncle Saul,” he said. “So do you want to hear what I did on my vacation or not?”

Saul nodded. “This is where your Mr. Harrington was staying,” said Aaron, sliding across a black and white photograph of a hotel in Beverly Hills. Saul left the picture flat on the table as he looked at it and slid it back.

“I learned very little,” said Aaron. “Mr. Harrington checked in on December eighth. A waitress remembered that a red-haired young man fitting Harrington’s description had breakfast in the hotel coffee shop the morning of the ninth. A porter
thinks
he remembers seeing a man driving the yellow Datsun like the one Harrington rented leave the hotel parking lot at about three
P.M.
that Tuesday. He couldn’t be sure.” Aaron slipped across two more sheets of paper. “Here are photocopies of the newspaper article . . . one paragraph . . . and the police report. The yellow Datsun was found parked near the airport Hertz office on Wednesday, the tenth. The Hertz people eventually billed Harrington’s mother. An anonymous money order for the $329.48 hotel bill arrived in the mail on Monday, the fifteenth. Same day I got there. The envelope was postmarked New York. Would you know anything about that, Uncle Saul?”

Saul looked at him. “I didn’t think so,” said Aaron. He closed the dossier. “What makes this really strange is that Mr. Harrington’s two part-time assistants in his amateur detective agency— Dennis Leland and Selby White— were killed in an automobile accident that same week. Friday, December twelfth. They were driving from New York to Boston after receiving a long distance call. . . . What’s the matter, Uncle Saul?”

“Nothing.”

“You looked sort of sick there for a second. Did you know these two guys? White had gone to Princeton with Harrington . . . he’s from the Hyannis Port Whites.”

“I met them once,” said Saul. “Go on.”

Aaron squinted slightly at his uncle. Saul remembered the same expression on a small boy’s face when the child was not certain about the veracity of his uncle’s fantastic bedtime stories. “So what ever happened, it sounds very professional,” said Aaron. “Something the American crime families— the new Mafia— would carry out. Three hits. Very clean. Two of the bodies in an automobile accident; the truck that ran them off the road still unaccounted for. The third body gone for good. But the question is, what was Francis Harrington working on in California that would so upset the professionals— if it was the Mafia— that they would go back to their old style of doing things? And why all three? Leland and White had real jobs, their involvement with Harrington’s half-assed detective agency was an occasional weekend lark. Harrington had about three cases last year, and two of them were divorce things for friends. The third was a waste of time where he tried to track down some poor old schmuck’s biological parents forty-eight years after they deserted him.”

“Where did you learn all this?” Saul asked softly. “I talked to Francis’s part-time secretary after I got back on Wednesday and visited the office one evening.”

“I take it back, Moddy. You do have a streak of James Bond in you.”

“Uh-huh,” said Aaron. He looked around. The restaurant was no longer serving lunch and the tables were thinning out as people left. Enough slow eaters were left so as not to make Saul and Aaron conspicuous, yet no one sat within fifteen feet of them. Somewhere in the basement hallway outside the restaurant a child began to cry with a voice like a klaxon. “You ain’t heard nothing yet, Uncle Saul,” Aaron said in his best cowboy drawl.

“Go on.”

“The secretary said Harrington had been getting a lot of phone calls from a man who never identified himself,” said Aaron. “The police wanted to know who this guy was. She told them she didn’t know . . . and Harrington had kept no records of the case except for travel expenses and so forth. What ever it was, this new client got Francis busy enough that he got his old college buddies to help him out.”

“Uh-huh,” said Saul.

Aaron sipped from his coffee cup. “You said Harrington was an old student of yours, Uncle Saul. He didn’t have any transcripts in the Columbia record office.”

“He audited two courses,” said Saul. “
War and Human Behavior
and the
Psychology of Aggression.
Francis did not fail at Princeton because he was slow . . . he was brilliant and bored. My classes did not bore him. Now go on, Moddy.”

Aaron’s mouth was set in a determined way that reminded Saul of David Eshkol’s most stubborn expression when the two would argue the morality of guerrilla warfare late into the pale night on the farm outside of Tel Aviv. “The secretary told the police that Harrington’s client sounded like a Jew,” said Aaron. “She told me she could always tell a Jew by the way they spoke. This one sounded foreign. German or Hungarian maybe.”

“Nu?”

“
Are you going to tell me what’s going on, Uncle Saul?”

“Not right now, Moddy. I do not know for sure myself.”

Aaron’s mouth remained set. He tapped the other two dossiers. They were thicker than the first one. “I’ve got some other stuff here that is a lot wilder than the dead end with Harrington,” he said. “It seems to me that it would be a fair trade.”

Saul raised his eyebrows slightly. “So now it is a transaction, not a favor?”

Aaron sighed and opened the second folder. “Borden, William D. Supposedly born August 8, 1906, in Hubbard, Ohio, but no documentation between birth certificate in 1906 and a sudden rush of social security cards, driver’s licenses, and so forth, in 1946. It’s the kind of thing the FBI computers usually pay attention to, but no one seems to have given a damn in this case. My guess is that if we visited cemeteries around Hubbard, Ohio . . . wherever the hell that is . . . we’d find a little gravestone for Baby Billy Borden, may angels fly him to his rest, et cetera, et cetera. Meanwhile, our grown-up Mr. Borden seems to have popped into existence in Newark, New Jersey, in early ’forty-six. Moved to New York City the next year. Whoever he was, he had money. He was one of those invisible backers of Broadway plays during the ’forty-eight and ’forty-nine seasons. Bought in with the big boys but didn’t wine and dine with them it seems . . . at least I can’t find any gossip about it in the old columns and none of the old crones who work for some of the old-line producers and agents remember him.

“Anyway, Borden went out to Los Angeles in 1950, bankrolled his first picture that same year, and has been a fixture ever since. He became more visible in the sixties. Hollywood insiders knew him as The Kraut or Big Bill Borden. Threw occasional parties, but never a loud enough one to get the cops involved. The man was a saint . . . no traffic violations, no tickets for jaywalking . . . nothing. Either that or he had enough clout to get anything naughty taken off the record. What do you think, Uncle Saul?”