Carrion Comfort (48 page)

“I have a slight problem here,” said Trask. “Nieman, this is not a secure line,” came the soft voice Saul guessed to be Barent’s. “Are you alone?”

Trask hesitated and looked at Harrington. When Francis did nothing but smile, Trask said, “Ah, no, sir. There are two gentlemen here in Senator Kellog’s office with me.”

Colben’s voice crackled on the speaker phone. “What the fuck’s going on there, Trask? What’s this all about?”

“Calmly, Richard,” came Barent’s voice. “Go ahead, Nieman.”

Trask raised his hand, palm up, toward Harrington in an “after you” gesture.

“Mr. Barent, we would like to apply for membership in one of your clubs,” said Harrington.

“I’m sorry, you have the advantage of me, sir,” Barent said. “My name is Francis Harrington,” said Harrington. “My employer here is Dr. Saul Laski of Columbia University.”

“Trask!” came Colben’s voice. “What’s happening?”

“Hush,” said Barent. “Mr. Harrington, Dr. Laski, pleased to make your acquaintance. How can I be of help?”

On the couch, Saul Laski let out a tired sigh. Until the Oberst had given his name, he had held out some hope of emerging alive from this nightmare. Now, although he had no idea what game the Oberst was playing or who these people were in relation to the trio of Willi, Nina, and the Fuller woman, he doubted if the Oberst would name him if he were not willing to sacrifice him.

“You mentioned a club,” prompted Barent’s voice. “Can you be more specific?”

Harrington grinned horribly. His left arm remained raised, his thumb on the detonator trigger. “I would like to join
your
club,” he said.

Barent’s voice sounded amused. “I belong to many clubs, Mr. Harrington. Can you be even more specific?”

“I am only interested in the most select club possible,” said Harrington. “And I have always had a weakness for islands.”

The speaker phone chuckled. “As have I, Mr. Harrington, but although Mr. Trask is an excellent sponsor, I am afraid that most of the clubs to which I belong require additional references. You mention that your employer Dr. Laski is there. Do you also wish an application, Doctor?”

Saul could think of nothing that would improve his situation. He remained silent.

“Perhaps you . . . ah . . . represent someone else as well,” said Barent. Harrington only chuckled. “He has twelve pounds of plastic explosive hooked to a dead man’s switch,” Trask said without emotion. “I find that an impressive reference. Why don’t we all agree to meet somewhere else and talk about this?”

“I have men on the way,” came Colben’s clipped voice. “Hang tight, Trask.”

Nieman Trask sighed, rubbed his brow, and leaned closer to the speaker phone. “Colben, you miserable fuck, if you put anyone within ten blocks of this building, I’ll personally rip your goddamn heart out. Now stay the fuck
out
of this. Barent, are you there?”

C. Arnold Barent spoke as if he had heard none of the preceding dialogue. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Harrington, but I make it a personal policy never to be on the selection committees of any of the clubs I happen to frequent. I do enjoy sponsoring the occasional new member, however. Perhaps you would be so kind as to see if you could give me the forwarding address of some prospective members I had hoped to contact.”

“Shoot,” said Harrington.

It was at that moment that Saul Laski felt Trask slip into his mind. It was exquisitely painful— as if someone had slid a long, sharp wire into his left ear. He shuddered once but was not allowed to cry out. His eyes moved to the automatic still on the carpet a foot beyond the dead body-guard’s outstretched hand. He sensed Trask’s cold calculations of timing and effort: two seconds to spring, a second to rise and fire into Harrington’s brain while simultaneously grabbing his fist, holding the trigger down like the spoon of a grenade. Saul felt his hands clench and unclench as if of their own volition, watched his legs stir slightly, stretching like a runner before a race. Pushed farther and farther into the helpless attic of his own mind, Saul wanted to scream but had no voice. Is this what Francis had been experiencing for weeks?

“William Borden,” said Barent.

Saul had all but forgotten what the discussion was about. Trask moved Saul’s right leg a bit, changed his center of gravity, tensed his right arm.

“Don’t know the gentleman,” Harrington said lightly. “Next?”

Saul felt every muscle in his body tense as Trask prepared him. He sensed the slight change of plan. Trask would have him hit Harrington on the run, push him backward, hold the left hand clenched until he had shoved Francis into the senator’s main office, then block the forward force of the explosion with his body while Trask dropped under the massive oak desk. Saul wanted to scream a warning at the Oberst.

“Miss Melanie Fuller,” said Barent. “Oh yes,” said Harrington. “I believe she can be reached in Germantown.”

“Which Germantown is that?” asked Trask even as he readied Saul for the attack. Ignore the gun. Grab the hand. Force him back, away. Keep your body between Harrington and Trask’s desk.

“The suburb of Philadelphia,” Harrington said amiably. “I can’t recall the precise address, but if you check the listings along Queen Lane you should be able to contact the lady.”

“Very good,” said Barent. “One more thing. If you could . . .”

“Excuse me a second,” said Harrington. He laughed an old man’s laugh again. “Good God, Trask,” he said. “Do you think I can’t feel that? You could not commandeer this shell in a month . . .
Mein Gott
, man, you sneak and grope around like a teenager trying to cop a feel . . . is that the expression? . . . in the balcony of a movie house. And release my poor Jewish friend while you are at it. The instant he moves, I trigger this. That desk will become a thousand flying splinters. Ah, that is better . . .”

Saul collapsed onto the couch. His muscles spasmed in sudden release from the tight vise of control.

“Now, where were we, Mr. Barent?” said Harrington.

There was static for several seconds before Barent’s calm voice came back on the speakerphone. “I’m sorry, Mr. Harrington, I’m talking to you from my private aircraft and I am afraid I have to go now. I appreciate your call and look forward to speaking to you again soon.”

“Barent!” yelled Trask. “Goddamn you, stay on the . . .”

“Good-bye,” said Barent. There was a click. The open line spat static. “Colben!” screamed Trask. “Say something.”

The heavy voice came on the line. “Sure. Get fucked, Nieman old pal.” Another click and a hum.

Trask looked up with the expression of a cornered animal. “It’s all right,” soothed Harrington. “I can leave my message with you. We can still do business, Mr. Trask. But I’d prefer that it be private. Dr. Laski, do you mind?”

Saul adjusted his glasses and blinked. He stood up. Trask glared at him. Harrington smiled. Saul turned, walked quickly through the senator’s office, and was running by the time he got to the first waiting room. He was out of the office and running down the hall before he remembered the secretary. He hesitated, then began running again.

Ahead of him, four men came around the corner. Saul turned, saw five men in dark suits run from the other direction, two veering toward Trask’s office.

He looked around in time to see three of the men at the end of the hall raise their revolvers in almost a single motion, hands together, arms extended, black circles of muzzles seeming very large even from a distance. Suddenly Saul was elsewhere.

Francis Harrington screamed in the silence of his own mind. Dimly he sensed Saul’s sudden presence there in the darkness with him. Together they watched through Harrington’s eyes as Nieman Trask shouted something, half rose from his chair, raised both hands in supplication.

“Auf Wiedersehen,” the Oberst said with Francis Harrington’s voice and released the trigger.

The south doors and wall to the corridor exploded outward in a ball of orange flame. Saul was suddenly flying through the air toward the three men in dark suits. Their raised arms flew back, one of the guns discharged— silently in the overwhelming rage of noise filling the corridor— and then they were also flying, tumbling backward, and striking the wall at the end of the corridor a scant second before Saul did.

After the impact, even as the crest of darkness broke over him, Saul heard the echo— not of the explosion, but of the old man’s voice saying
Auf Wiedersehen.

S
heriff Gentry enjoyed air travel but cared very little for his destination. He liked to fly because he found the phenomenon of being wedged into a coach seat of a pressurized tube suspended thousands of feet above the clouds a definite incentive to meditation. His destination, New York City, always struck him as a temptation toward other types of mindlessness: hive-think, street violence, paranoia, information overload, or gibbering insanity. Gentry had decided long ago that he was not a big-city person.

Gentry knew his way around Manhattan. When he had been in college a dozen years earlier, during the height of the Vietnam era, he and friends had spent more than a few weekends in the city— once renting a car in Chicago where his girlfriend worked at a Hertz outlet near the university, postdating the mileage 2,000 miles and driving straight through. After four days without sleep, six of them had ended up driving around the Chicago suburbs for two hours in the wee hours of the morning to bring the actual mileage up to and beyond what had been recorded as the starting mileage on the form.

Gentry took a shuttle bus into the Port Authority. There he hailed a cab to the Adison Hotel just off Times Square. The place was old and sliding into disrepute, its patrons mostly hookers and tourists from the sticks, but it retained a somewhat matronly air of pride about it. The Puerto Rican cook in the coffee shop was loud, profane, and skilled at his craft, and the room cost a third of what most Manhattan hotels charged. The last time he had been to New York, to transport an extradited eighteen-year-old who had murdered four convenience store clerks in Charleston, the county had been picking up Gentry’s tab and had booked his room.

Gentry showered some of the travel fatigue away and changed into comfortable blue corduroy slacks, an old turtleneck, his tan corduroy sports coat, a soft cap, and a topcoat that worked fine in Charleston but barely served to take the edge off New York’s winter wind. He hesitated and then removed the .357 Ruger from the suitcase and slipped it into the pocket of his overcoat. No, too bulky and obvious. He slid it into the waistband of his slacks. Definitely not. He had no clip-on holster for the Ruger; he always wore the belt and holster with his uniform and carried the department’s .38 Police Special when he was off duty. Why the hell had he brought the Ruger instead of the smaller gun? He finally ended up slipping the revolver into his sports coat pocket. He would have to leave his topcoat unbuttoned to the weather outside and leave it on inside to conceal the lump of the weapon.
What the hell
, thought Gentry.
We can’t all be Steve McQueen.

Before leaving the hotel he called his home in Charleston and triggered his answering machine. He did not expect a message from Natalie, but he had been thinking about her through the entire flight and looked forward to the chance of hearing her voice. Hers was the first message. “Rob, this is Natalie. It’s about two
P.M.
St. Louis time. I just got into St. Louis, but I’m leaving on the next flight to Philadelphia. I think I’ve got a lead on where we can find Melanie Fuller. Check page three of today’s Charleston paper . . . or one of the New York papers will probably have it. Gang murders in Germantown. Yeah, I don’t know
why
the old woman would be involved with a street gang, but it’s in
Germantown.
Saul said that our best bet in finding these people was to follow a trail of senseless violence like this. I promise I’ll keep a low profile . . . I’ll just look around and see if there’s anything promising for us to follow up on later. I’ll leave a message to night when I know where I’ll be staying. Gotta run. Be
careful
, Rob.”

“Shit,” Gentry said softly when he hung up the phone. He dialed his number again, let out a breath as his own voice told him to leave a message, and said after the beep, “Natalie, goddammit, do
not
stay in Philadelphia or Germantown or wherever you are. Someone
saw
you on Christmas Eve. Goddammit, if you’re not going to stay in St. Louis, join me here in New York. It’s
stupid
for us to be running around separately playing Joe Hardy and Nancy Drew. Call me here as soon as you get this message.” He gave his hotel phone and room numbers, paused, and hung up. “Damn,” he said. He brought his fist down hard enough to make the cheap desk wobble.

Gentry took the subway down to the Village and got off near St. Vincent’s. He flipped through his small notebook during the ride, reviewing all the notes he had taken: Saul’s address, Natalie’s comment that Saul had mentioned a house keeper named Tema, his extension at Columbia, the dean’s number that Gentry had called almost two weeks ago, the late Nina Drayton’s number. Not much, he thought. He called Columbia and confirmed that no one would be in the psychology department offices until next Monday.

Saul’s neighborhood did not fit Gentry’s preconceptions about the lifestyle of a New York psychiatrist. The sheriff reminded himself that Saul was more of a professor than a psychiatrist and then the neighborhood seemed more appropriate. The buildings were mostly four-and five-story tenements, restaurants and delis were to be found on most corners, and there was a sense of small town in the compactness of it all. A few couples hurried by— one of them a pair of males holding hands— but Gentry knew that most of the local inhabitants were uptown, ensconced in publishing houses, brokerages, bookstores, agencies, and other steel and glass cages, each floating somewhere between secretary and vice-president, earning the necessary thousands to lease their two or three rooms in the Village and waiting for the big move, the breakthrough, the inevitable rise to the higher floor, the bigger office, the corner windows, and the short cab ride home to the Central Park West brownstone. The wind gusted. Gentry clutched his topcoat tighter and hurried on.

Dr. Saul Laski was not home. Gentry was not surprised. He knocked again and stood awhile on the narrow landing, listening to the muted garble of tele visions and children’s wails, smelling the corned beef and cabbage echo of decades gone by. Then he removed a credit card from his wallet and slipped the lock. Gentry shook his head; Saul Laski was a nationally recognized expert on violence, a survivor of the death camp, but his home security left a lot to be desired.

It was a large apartment by Village standards— a comfortable living room, small kitchen, smaller bedroom, and a large study. Every room— even the bathroom— had books in it. The study was laden with notebooks, files, shelves of carefully labeled abstracts, and hundreds of books— many in German or Polish. Gentry checked each room, paused a minute to glance through a manuscript stacked near the IBM typewriter, and prepared to leave. He felt like an intruder. The apartment smelled as if it had not been lived in for a week or two, the kitchen was spotless, the refrigerator almost empty, but there was no dust, no stack of accumulated mail, nor other outward signs of absence. Gentry made sure there were no messages near the phone, walked through each room quickly to make sure that he had missed no clues to Saul’s whereabouts, and quietly let himself out.

He had gone down a flight when he passed an old woman, graying hair done up in a bun. Gentry stopped after she passed and then tipped his cloth cap and said, “Excuse me, ma’am. Might you be Tema?”

The woman stopped and squinted suspiciously at him. Her voice held a thick accent of Eastern Eu rope. “I don’t know you.”

“No, ma’am,” said Gentry and removed his cap. “And I’m sorry for using your first name, but Saul didn’t mention your last name.”

“Mrs. Walisjezlski,” said the old woman. “Who are you?”

“I’m Sheriff Bobby Gentry,” he said. “I’m a friend of Saul’s and I’m trying to find him.”

“Dr. Laski never mentioned any Sheriff Gentry.” She gave his name a hard
G.

“No, ma’am, I don’t suppose he did. We just met a couple of weeks ago when he came down to Charleston. That’s South Carolina. Maybe he mentioned that he was comin’ down there for a visit?”

“Dr. Laski just said he had business,” snapped the woman. She snorted. “As if the plane tickets weren’t right there for a blind person to see! Two days, he said. Maybe three. Mrs. W, he says, if you will be so kind as to water the plants. Ten days later, his plants would be dead if I did not faithfully come.”

“Mrs. Walisjezlski, have you seen Dr. Laski in the past week?” asked Gentry.

The woman tugged her sweater tighter and said nothing. “We had an appointment,” said Gentry. “Saul said that he’d call when he got back . . . probably last Saturday. But I haven’t heard from him.”

“He has no sense of time,” said the woman. “His own nephew calls me from Washington last week. ‘Is Uncle Saul all right?’ he says. ‘He was supposed to come to dinner Saturday,’ he says. Knowing Dr. Laski, he just forgot . . . went off to a seminar somewhere. Am I to tell his nephew that? His only family in America?”

“Is that the nephew that works in Washington?” said Gentry. “Which one else?”

Gentry nodded, noticed from the woman’s posture and tone that she was uneasy talking, ready to move on. “Saul said I could contact him at his nephew’s, but I lost the number. It’s right in Washington, isn’t it?”

“No, no,” said Mrs. Walisjezlski. “That is the embassy. Dr. Laski says they live way out in the country now.”

“Could Saul be at the Polish Embassy?”

She squinted at him. “Why would Dr. Laski be at the Polish Embassy? Aaron works at the Israeli Embassy, but he does not
live
there. You say you are a
sheriff
? What business does the doctor have with a sheriff?”

“I’m an admirer of his book,” said Gentry. He clicked a ballpoint pen and scribbled on the back of one of his poorly printed business cards. “Here is where I’m staying to night. The other number is my home phone in Charleston. As
soon
as Saul gets back, have him call me. It is very important.” He started down the stairs. “Oh, by the way,” he called up to her, “when I call the embassy, does Saul’s nephew spell his last name with one ‘e’ in it or two?”

“How could there be two e’s in Eshkol?” clucked Mrs. Walisjezlski. “How indeed?” said Gentry and clumped downstairs.

Natalie did not call. Gentry waited until after ten, called Charleston, and was rewarded by nothing but her original message and his own tirade. At ten after eleven he phoned again. Still nothing new. At one-fifteen
A.M.
he gave it up and tried to sleep. The noise through the thin wall sounded like half a dozen Iranians arguing. At three
A.M.
Gentry called Charleston again. Still nothing new. He left another message apologizing for his cursing and emphasizing the importance of her not wandering around Philadelphia alone.

Early the next morning, Gentry tried his answering machine again, left the name of the Washington hotel where he had booked a room, and caught the 8:15 shuttle. The flight was too brief for him to do any serious thinking, but he removed his notebook and a file from his briefcase and studied them.

Natalie had read about the December 20 bombing at the Senate Office Building and had been concerned that Saul might have been involved. Gentry had pointed out that not
every
murder, accident, and terrorist attack in America could be traced back to Laski’s aging Oberst. He reminded her that the television news had suggested that Puerto Rican nationalists had been behind the explosion that had killed six people. He pointed out that the attack on the Senate Office Building had occurred only a few hours after Saul would have arrived in the city, that his name had not been listed among the dead— although the terrorist himself had not been identified, and that she was getting paranoid. Natalie had been reassured. Gentry still had his doubts.

It was after eleven by the time Gentry arrived at the FBI building. He had no idea if anyone would be working on a Saturday. A receptionist confirmed that Special Agent Richard Haines was in and then kept Gentry waiting several minutes before buzzing the busy man. She announced that Special Agent Haines would see him. Gentry contained his glee. A young man with an expensive suit and an unsuccessful mustache, a sort of Jimmy Olsen version of a Junior G-man, led Gentry to a security area where they took his photograph, recorded pertinent data, passed him through a metal detector, and gave him a laminated visitor’s pass. Gentry was glad that he had left the Ruger in the suitcase at the hotel. The young man wordlessly led Gentry down corridors, into an elevator, through an area of three-sided cubicles, down another corridor, and then knocked on a door clearly marked Special Agent Richard Haines. When Haines’s voice called “Come on in,” the youth nodded and turned on his heel. Gentry stifled the urge to call him back to give him a tip.

Richard Haines’s office was as large and tastefully decorated as Gentry’s was small and cluttered. Photographs hung on the walls. Gentry caught a glimpse of a joweled and pig-eyed man who might have been the late J. Edgar Hoover shaking hands with a somewhat less gray-haired Richard Haines, and then he was being waved to his seat. Haines did not stand up or offer to shake hands.

“What brings you up to Washington, Sheriff Gentry?” Haines asked in his smooth baritone.

Gentry shifted his bulk in the small chair to get more comfortable, decided that the thing had been designed to keep people from getting comfortable, and cleared his throat. “Just on vacation, Dick, an’ thought I’d drop in to say hello.”

Haines raised an eyebrow. He did not stop shuffling papers. “That’s nice of you, Sheriff, but it’s sort of hectic around here this weekend. If it’s about the Mansard House murders, I don’t have anything new that I haven’t sent to you through Terry and the Atlanta office.”

Gentry crossed his legs and shrugged. “I was just in the neighborhood and thought I’d drop in. Real impressive setup you boys got here, Dick.”

Haines grunted. “Hey,” said Gentry, “what happened to your chin? Looks like someone clipped you a good one there. Have trouble makin’ an arrest?”