Winter Kills (22 page)

Someone, somewhere was trying to teach him futility
. This came to him with the clarity of a night ball game—shadowless and static. He had to try to keep in mind that, so far, only one pattern seemed to exist: a pattern of confusion and exhaustion intended to teach him that all striving was fruitless, that when he understood the futility, he would find peace and safety for the people he loved. If that were so, he had to find Yvette and keep her with him. He felt smothered by the terrible fear that these people in the shadows around him were capable of doing to Yvette what they had done to Keifetz and twenty-two others. But if he was on this bummer through a fun house of the American myths, surely Pa’s money could save them—Yvette and himself—surely Pa’s money was the magic cloak that could cover them and let them survive any darkness?

***

He left the elevator at the tower floor, opened the door of the apartment and walked into the foyer.

Keifetz was asleep in a large chair that had been placed to face the door. There was a large manila envelope in his lap. Nick stared at him. Nausea hit him. The door slammed behind him. Keifetz awoke suddenly, came to his feet reflexively in one leap, recognized Nick as he focused and said, “Jesus, I thought you’d never get here, baby.”

TUESDAY, JANUARY 29, 1974—BRUNEI

Nick worked it all out by getting hysterical. He sobbed uncontrollably. Keifetz led him into Tim’s bathroom and put his head under the cold-water shower. Nick stopped weeping. He dried himself off. “What happened?” he asked Keifetz.

“I was driving to the office with the radio on,” Keifetz said, “when they announced that Tate and Sis Ryan had been killed in that automobile accident. I knew right away what kind of an accident that was. So I got on the radio phone in the car and called Daisy and told her to meet me at Fong’s—that’s kind of a, you know, kind of a coffee place—and to keep her mouth shut. I told her to bring every dime there was in petty cash. This cost you about thirty-five hundred dollars, incidentally.”

“That’s okay,” Nick said. “I’m going to charge it to my father.”

“When she got there I explained that Tate and Sis had been murdered and that if I just went on about my business I would be next. Now, I know you don’t know Daisy, but she is a terrific woman. She can do anything and she has the nerve of ten Apaches. I told her that you and your father were working on the thing that had caused the murders of Tate and Sis, and that it was all in the deposition Tate and Sis had taken at the hospital with us. She was hip. So I told her to go to Tate’s office and say casually that she had come by to pick up the favor Tate had done for me—she knows Tate’s secretary
very
well—then to go to Sergeant Ali
Kushandra at the cops and to say, nice and easy, that I had sent her over to pick up Fletcher’s prints and photographs. We were talking in a room I rented at Fong’s—you can get rooms there besides coffee—and I told her to bring everything back to me.”

“Daisy knows you’re alive?”

“She got me out.”

“But she was so stricken with grief on the telephone she could hardly talk.”

“She’s a terrific woman, Nick. I just told her she had to stay very convincing. Also, she could have thought I’d be killed trying to get this deposition here. She likes me. We’re going to be married.”

***

Daisy walked to the Shell offices, then to police headquarters, then to Fong’s. She was a small, pretty and dazzlingly intelligent-looking Palawanese woman from the Philippine archipelago whose father had been an American GI who came in with the occupying forces on March 2, 1945. Her father, who owned a Shell station in the Oranges, New Jersey, had paid for her education with the nuns in Brunei. She was nineteen years old. She was the embodiment of Christopher Colombo’s inspiration (from previous gossip by Marco Polo) to find a route to the East Indies, where gold was in abundance “to a degree scarcely credible” and “sweet scented trees like sandalwood and camphor, pepper, nutmegs, spikenard, galangal, cubebs, cloves and all other valuable spices abounded.”

Keifetz locked the door. He patted her softly on the behind, took the envelope from her and sat down at a table.

“Will they try to kill you, sir?”

“Goddammit, Daisy, don’t call me ‘sir.’ Yes, they will kill me if they can find me. But that’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir. They will not find you.”

He stopped opening the envelope. “Come here.” She approached. He sat her on his lap as if she were a toy.

“Are you sure you understand that we are going to get married, Daisy?”

“Oh, yes.”

“Then you mustn’t call me ‘sir.’”

“After we are married, if you command me, I will not call you ‘sir,’” Daisy said.

“What will you call me?”

“How about ‘baby’?”

“Not ‘baby.’ Too cold. How about ‘Your Eminence’?”

“Yes,” she sighed. “That fits you best. It is a wonderful private name.”

He kissed her enthusiastically, then lifted her off his lap. It was five minutes to seven. The sun was up and very hot. He checked through the pages of the deposition, checked the fingerprints and photographs. “Everything is here,” he said. “Sis was a good legal stenographer. This is what we do, Daisy. On the way out, tell Fong to send me up some tea. Then go out to my place with a cardboard box, pack me a change of clothes in it and send it by air mail to General Delivery in Hong Kong. And bring me the pistol. Okay?”

“Sure.”

“Fong’s cousin has a boat. Which reminds me—did you bring me the money?”

“Sure.”

“How much was in petty cash?”

“Thirty-five hundred dollars.”

“I have to speak to Nick about switching the petty cash to Swiss francs.”

“What about the boat?”

“I don’t know. Except I can’t leave by plane. They’d have somebody waiting for me when I landed. So I have to go by boat, a private boat, at night. They would expect me to head for the Singapore airport, so that’s out.”

“Hong Kong is out too, sir. If it isn’t Singapore, they’ll think of Hong Kong.”

“If it’s more than one airport, they’ll have to check
passenger manifests, so I can’t travel with this passport. What name should I use?”

“Gary Cooper!”

He fell about with laughter. She laughed so hard she had to lean against the wall. When she could speak again she said, “If you take Fong’s cousin’s boat to my island, I can send you to people who will get you to Manila by plane, then you can fly out from there. Where are you going, sir?”

“To San Francisco, then I make a call to Palm Springs and they tell me where to go. Wherever Nick is.”

“I get your clothes.” Daisy left. “I will mail them to General Delivery, Manila, okay?”

“No, they could miss me. Make it registered air mail, care of General Delivery, San Francisco.”

“But if you are all the way to San Francisco in those clothes, you can buy clothes in San Francisco.”

“That’s right. Therefore just go down and tell Fong to send up some tea and come right back.”

“But what about the pistol?”

“No. Fong will have to get me a pistol. You and I have to plan my death here in Brunei today so you can announce it to the police and the newspaper and radio.”

“I will get the tea, sir, while you think.”

When she came back with the tea he had it all figured out. They sipped tea. He explained. “You go back to the office and call Gelbart in from the Number One rig. He is the safest man and he’s a foreman. When Gelbart gets to the office you hand him a note I am going to give you in my own writing, which he will dig, telling him to come here to Fong’s. When he gets here I am going to let him read the deposition, because he feels almost the same way I feel about Tim Kegan and the people who killed him. Maybe he’s not a nut about it like me, but killing Kegan was a very important thing in his life as an American. Okay. Gelbart goes back to Number One supposedly at about eleven, because you
put him down in the book for a seat on the eleven o’clock chopper going out. Then you call the pier at about twelve thirty and order a seat in the chopper for me to go out to Number One at about two o’clock, just before the rain starts.”

“But, sir—”

“No, it’s all right. Because the two o’clock chopper is the one Gelbart will actually take. He won’t be aboard the eleven o’clock. He goes out to Number One in my seat, wearing my rain rigs. Then at about seven o’clock at night—Number One is about thirty miles out at sea—when the rain is really coming down, he radios to you at the base that I slipped on the deck of the rig and went over the side in shark-infested waters, and because the seas were too heavy and there was no sign of me, they didn’t attempt any rescue operation. Okay?”

“Oh, very good, sir!”

“Now, most people know we are crazy about each other, so when you get the news you have to be sad. I am not exactly sure how Filipina women show grief, but I know you will do it correctly.”

“We weep.”

“Well, as far as I’m concerned you can’t overdo it.”

“I will make terrible scenes, sir.”

“But first tell the police and tell the newspaper and the radio station. Then announce that the office will be closed for two days in mourning. Then you stay right beside my desk and files and post strong security inside and outside the building. Just wait for Nick or Carswell to call, and tell them everything, but don’t remember to call them, because you are too grieved.”

***

Keifetz listened to his own obituary on the eight o’clock, nine o’clock and ten o’clock news that night, and, all in all, he wasn’t too displeased. If he had known the station would go into such detail, he might have remembered to tell Daisy to slip into his biography that he had gone to Harvard and had once won a
Bollingen Award for poetry. Neither was true, but it would have impressed a lot of people in Brunei.

He got into Fong’s cousin’s boat at eleven fifteen. It was a compact hydrofoil used to smuggle whiskey to the Mohammedans in the area and transistor electric shavers that fetishists adored using on pubic hair. They ran through the Balabac Strait, then along the south side of Palawan to Puerto Princesa, a distance of about 437 statute miles. They got into Puerto Princesa at a quarter to six the next evening, with Keifetz’ teeth hanging out from the banging by the sea. Fong charged him only five hundred dollars each way (the cousin had to get back to Brunei without a tooth in his head), which was a steal. Manila was only four hundred and eighty miles to the northeast, Puerto Princesa had an airfield, and a good old workhorse Beechcraft got him to the Manila airport at eleven the next morning after a marvelous night’s sleep. Keifetz could speak Tagalog. Daisy had sent ahead such an exalted description of his position in the world, however, that no one in the meeting party would dare to speak to him. A chief had to be summoned so that Keifetz could find a place to sleep and to make sure he got the plane into Manila.

He slept sublimely on the flight into San Francisco and felt wonderfully refreshed especially when he called Palm Springs and was told that Nick was in New York. But he met a young woman in an airport Pancake Parlor, checked in with her at the airport hotel and got himself exhausted all over again. Then he went on to New York.

MONDAY, FEBRUARY 4, 1974—NEW YORK

Keifetz said, “You don’t look so good.”

“I was wondering if it is possible that all the others might come back to life.”

“What others? Tate and Sis Ryan really caught it.”

“Miles Gander is dead.”

“Miles? You connected him with this—this business?”

Nick nodded. “He went with me when we found the rifle. It was where Fletcher said it would be, but the police inspector had to get permission from the building manager to look in the room where the rifle was hidden, and there was a tenant who worked in the room—so they all saw the rifle and now they are all dead.”

“Why?”

“The rifle has disappeared. No rifle, no witnesses to finding the rifle, just my unsupported story.”

“How come you got away?”

“Somebody tried to poison me in Tulsa. I could say I’m pretty sure it was Z. K. Dawson, but the trouble is, it’s too open and shut. Nothing else about any of this is open and shut. Then somebody sent a professional killer to throw me out of that window.”

“But he didn’t.”

“I have thought about that a lot. I mean, I’m no puny weakling in the Charles Atlas ad, but this guy was a trained one-hundred-percent mercenary warrior. I mean, he had every advantage—surprise, intent,
weapons, strength and experience—and yet, somehow, I vanquished him.”

“I see what you mean.”

“These people have never been shy about killing. I am the key gofer in all of this—the low man, the goddamn messenger who’s here to go-fer things. How come they haven’t killed me? I’ll tell how come. They don’t need to kill me, and they absolutely will not kill me. Why don’t they need to kill me?”

“I was just going to ask you that,” Keifetz said.

“Better yet, why are they going to such fantastic trouble and expense to confuse me and tire me out?”

“They want you to quit.”

“Sure. But not just quit. They want me to quit satisfied that nothing in this world can be done about it, what’s the use, that’s the way it is, et cetera, et cetera.”

“Well, that’s the permanent policy the people who own this country have for all the rest of the population, Nicholas, so why not for you? Listen, I hate to say it, but even if someone might call you a co-owner, it looks like, in this, you’re just one of the rest of the electorate. After all, on the inside, oligarchies are mutually feuding structures, right? And maybe the guys who are teaching you that famous what’s-the-use philosophy are with that same mob, those other fellas who own the country?”

“Keifetz, did you have to go to a Marxist Sunday group when you were a kid?”

“I don’t answer tricky questions like that.”

“Then what makes you so smart? Come on—what Marxist Sunday group did they make you go to?”

“It’s Marxist
study
group. It wasn’t a
Sunday
school, fahcrissake. To a socialist worker, what is a Sunday school? It is manipulation by the bosses to interfere with the day of rest.”