Monsters and Magicians (15 page)

Seos followed the course of one of the river's larger tributaries, and had approached closely enough to the foothills to be able to see tendrils of smoke rising up from a spot too dim with distance to yet be clearly discerned, when a telepathic message reached his mind.

"If you get any closer to that steading, Seos, you'll all be seen. Veer off to the southeast and fly lower, just above treetop level. Do it, now, Seos! You, too, Ehrah! This is serious business today, not recreation."

Gritting his teeth in a brief flareup of his anger at being made a subordinate of his elder brothers, Seos beamed back, "It will be done as you desire, brother-mine. Where are we to find you? Even a scent as rank as yours doesn't carry so far or so high, Gabrios."

"Just fly low, parallel to the line of foothills, Seos," came the reply, "Mikos will meet you and guide you here to our camp."

he was here rather late, but he's gone now. Ms. Dardrey is still here though, I believe."

He started to reach for the intercom, then in-qmred/'In her officer

"No," was the answer, "in the library, when I last saw her."

Picking up his coffee again and sitting back in the embrace of his desk chair, he nodded, "Okay, Myrna, your day is done now, your usual superlative job and I once more am in your debt. Go home. And on your way out, ask Ms. Dardrey to please step in here when she has time. Goodnight, Myrna."

As the door closed behind the black-haired, voluptuous-bodied and almost frighteningly efficient woman, Pedro arose and plodded over to open a hidden wardrobe wherein to hang his suit coat, then across to the liquor cabinet where he selected a decanter of cognac, poured a generous measure into a snifter, then went back to his desk. From the box on that desk, he selected a puro and set one end of it to soak in the cognac before swallowing half the somewhat-cooled coffee, extracted a business card from a vest pocket and dialed one of the numbers embossed upon it.

"Pedro Goldferb," he said after a moment, "to speak to Mr. Paoli, please." After yet another pause, he answered, feeling just a trifle foolish, "Black, green, granola, orange, nickel. All right, what did you find out here, Pete?"

While listening, he nodded several times, wordless, grimaced once and finally showed his teeth in what was clearly no variety of smile, indeed, bore more resemblance to a snarl.

"Okay," he at last said, "you have yourself a contract. How much down?" He winced. "That much? Okay, come by here tomorrow and you'll get my signature and check. How did I know, you ask? Look, Pete, you don't wait for an answer and I won't ask you just how a man with a record like yours managed to come by a simple business license, much less the others you had to get to operate, agreed? All right, see you tomorrow."

He was just hanging up the telephone when a knock sounded on his office door. "Come," he said in a tone that he knew would carry through the polished walnut.

Danna Dardrey opened one of the doors and moved through it. Pedro noted that she, too, looked tired, drawn—not as tired as he looked or felt, but tired, nonetheless.

"I'd tell you to have some sherry, Danna," he commented, "but you look like even a half a glass would put you down for the full count. I told you to go home and sleep this early A.M., not go carousing in every late-hour bar in the city. Pardon me for saying it, my dear, but you look awful."

She made a wry face. "Thanks a whole heap, Pedro. For your information, I did go home and to bed . . . alone and sober. But then I couldn't sleep, so I sat up reading until it was time to eat and shower and come to work. And by the way, Pedro, pardon me for saying it, but you don't look so good yourself; you look, to use an expression I often heard during my college days, as if you were dragged through a wringer by your . . . ahh, nose. So where did you go after I drove off? Out boozing and whoring? Or back

here to work until court-time, as you've done repeatedly before? You know, Pedro, you're the heart and soul of this association of ours. Where are any of us going to be if you wreck your health or work yourself to death, huh? You're human, too, you know."

His reply was a cryptic half-smile. "Yes, I sometimes have trouble remembering that last, Danna, that's why I'm so glad I have you and Myrna to stand behind me intoning, 'Remember, thou art but a

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man.

"Oh, Pedro," she snorted, "be serious. I was being quite serious.

"And speaking of being serious, did you know that there was a whole crew of men with all kinds of weird-looking devices poking and prying and snooping and measuring things and taking apart telephones and other fixtures and equipment all over these offices all morning, all lunch hour and part of the afternoon, too?"

He answered simply. "Yes, Danna, I know."

"Well, who the hell were they, Pedro? What in God's name were they up to? When they moved their show into my office and took to tearing things apart, I went looking for the head cheese and found him, too. Pedro, that man looks like someone that Francis Ford Coppola would cast as a Mafia thug. His lips don't move at all when he talks and those eyes of his are icy—reptilian, almost. All he would tell me was that he was up here on orders. Whose, for Christ's sake?"

"Mine," replied Pedro. "Get some coffee, Danna, and sit down. Your rather uneventful pre-dawn morn-

ing was more than made up for by my own overly exciting one. Ill tell you about it ... it and a few other things you should know."

When he had told her all of the events of that morning, she demanded, "Do you really believe what that criminal you just let get away told you, Pedro? You really believe that Agent Blutegel tried to have you set upon and beaten and robbed? Look, I don't like the man either, not in the least, you know that, but . . . but Pedro, this is the United States of America, not Russia, not one of the Iron Curtain countries, not some dictator-run banana republic, and Henry Blutegel, for all else he is or might once have been, is a federal employee. Don't you think that that black man simply told you what he sensed you wanted to hear, told you anything to make you let him go?"

The saturnine man shook his head. "No, I don't, Danna. I think that Mr. Welford Roosevelt Harrison told me the full and unadorned truth as he recalled it—nothing more, nothing less than that.

"Fortunately for us all, as well as for the country as a whole, Blutegel is not your average, normal, run-of-the-mill I.R.S. agent. Rather, he is an aging, probably lonely, alcoholic who is quite possibly mentally ill as well, to judge from some of his behavior at times. Just now, moreover, he knows that it was us who, in collusion with Fitz, got him in a good bit of trouble with his service and his supervisors. Then, to pile Ossa upon Pelion in his mind, I proceeded to lure him out to Fitz's place, taunt his addiction shamelessly, outmaneuver him in his schemes and finally

allow you to slap him and myself laid painful hands upon him when he tried to retaliate against you. Danna, a man like Blutegel could never ever forgive those who so treated him in front of a younger agent whom he obviously considers a multiple inferior; so taunted, manipulated, embarrassed, belittled, humiliated, his masculine pride absolutely shattered, a Blutegel could never be expected to forget or forgive, either, and in an ongoing rage that he would rationalize as righteous, he would be capable of doing anything within his still-not-inconsiderable power to avenge himself on me, you, and probably poor young Agent Khoury, too, for that matter. ,,

Shivering, she said, hesitantly, "Pedro . . . look, after all you said just now. Anyway, while I was driving home last night . . . this morning, rather, I sat at one of those looonnng lights, the streets just about empty both ways, you know, and still the light stays red, that kind of thing. Anyway, just as the light changed for me and I started out into the intersection, this big old car zips out of an alley off the cross street, comes tearing down, building up speed, runs the light and comes within centimeters of plowing into me, full tilt. I wrote it off as just some drunk then, and maybe I still would, even now, except for one other thing. After he'd missed me and gone speeding through that intersection and halfway up the next block, he tried to make a U-turn without slowing down, skidded and fishtailed up onto the sidewalk, right through a cyclone fence and into a parked delivery van. But. . . but, Pedro, if he hadn't skidded . . . ? Do you think that maybe he wasn't

drunk? That maybe, if he'd been able to make that turn, he ... he might've come back after me? Maybe . . . maybe the man you said drove away . . . ? Maybe, do you think . . . ?" She shivered again.

"What land of car was it, Danna? What make?" asked the man.

She shrugged. "Oh, Pedro, I don't know all that much about the differences between American cars. Oldsmobile, I think, or Pontiac, or maybe Buick. All I know is that it was big, fairly old, not in very good shape, you know what I mean, full of dents and the vinyl all peeling off the top."

He frowned. "Well, the way he hit that column, then scraped metal all the way down that spiral ramp, then smashed through the gate down below, that Pontiac wouldn't have been in very good shape when it got out onto the street, but that was no aged car, hell, it was almost new.

"Where were you when this incident occurred, Danna; can you recall just what intersection it was?"

She nodded. "Yes, I do, because I'd meant to call the police and report it when I got home. Then I started thinking about some other things and forgot to call; some officer of the court I am. I was driving on Paar Boulevard and the light was at the corner of Paar and Hazelhurst Avenue."

Pedro shook his head. "Then there's no way that the guy who split out of here could have gotten up there in time to be in wait in an alley off Hazelhurst for you. In a helicopter he just might have been able to cover the distance in time; in a car, no way. No, these two were entirely separate incidents . . . not that it's not entirely possible that Herr Blutegel

couldn't have been behind them both. Remember, he hates you now fully as much as he hates me."

"Just for slapping him once, Pedro?" she remonstrated. "But I . . ."

"No," he replied, "not just for slapping him once, Danna, though you can be certain that that slap weighs in the balance. No, for witnessing the degradation of his blustering machismo, that is his heaviest grievance against you . . . unless . . . Oh, Christ!

"Danna, damn me for the worst land of a fool, I should have thought of this sooner. If the man we know as Henry Blutegel is really what you think him to be, what you say you have fleetingly envisioned him to be on occasions and if he has become aware that you are inquiring, prying into his past, then we may have more and far more dangerous enemies about.

"Danna, right at the tag-end of World War Two in Europe, an organization surfaced that specialized in helping Nazis and SS men and, sometimes, even their families get out of Europe or assume new, safer identities while still in Germany. In the years since the end of the war, this organization has hidden under a host of different, innocent-sounding names and acronyms, but its primary purpose has always remained the same: to see to the advancement of the goals of German National Socialism, to aid and abet the purposes of governments and individuals friendly to them and the still-living hideout Nazis and—and listen tight, Danna—to do all within their power to protect these hideouts from detection or apprehension. So, if Blutegel really is a phony Czech, a for-

mer member of the Nazi Schutzstaffel, then we just may have bitten off a bit more than we'll be able to chew alone. God Almighty damn! Why in hell couldn't I have thought of this ramification before I just merrily saw you off galloping on your white destrier with your lance and crusader's cross?"

Stunned by his revelations, Danna just sat in silence.

He glanced first at his watch, then at the desk clock and shook his head. "It's too late to now, but first thing in the morning, I'm going to start making some calls, pulling in a few markers, in D.C. and elsewhere around the map. Like I just said, this may have already gotten for too big for us to try to handle alone. But there are more people closer to us than your chap in Vienna who also like to get their teeth into hidden war criminals, and I happen to know at least two of them. They know others and the others know many others."

"But Pedro," she said hurriedly, worriedly, "this thing about Blutegel . . . it's only a hunch, a vague suspicion of mine, maybe bred simply out of my dislike for the man. I've dug up not one supporting fact to damn him, not really even the ghost of one, don't you see? And ..."

"And," he interrupted her, brusquely, "Henry Blutegel has already damned himself in my eyes, at least, by performing or bullying others into performing criminal acts on his behalf. Admittedly, this time he did them for personal rather than political purposes ... I hope and pray . . . but one cannot but wonder just where and when and how he learned to think along such lines, Danna."

"Pedro," she said softly but with strength, "think,

please, before you call in others and do something rash; you have only the unsupported word of a hired strong-arm man."

"Not quite just that alone, Danna," he assured her. "I didn't get around to telling you quite everything, earlier this evening. During some of the longer recesses, today, I phoned some police-types, as well as some fellow attorneys connected with the city in one way or another.

"When Mr. Meems recovered sufliciendy to be again read his rights, told with just what he was to be charged and came to the realization that—win, lose or draw—he was more than likely going to jail, going directly to jail without passing Go or collecting two hundred dollars, he became most voluble, well before he spoke one word about or to an attorney.

"It seems that Mr. Meems is a tax cheat, a self-confessed tax cheat of some years' practice. About five years ago he was all but wiped out, financially speaking, as outcome of a divorce court's decision. In order to keep his business going, his dozen or so employees employed, he began to do highly creative forms of accounting on his tax records, both personal and business. After a few years of seeming success, he was suddenly telephoned at his office one day by . • . guess who, Danna?"