Winter Kills (35 page)

Nick slid the photograph out of its envelope and extended it to Cerutti. “Who is this?”

Cerutti looked at the picture of the round old man with the sweeping white forelock and the wide pink hair part. “In my scenario that was Casper Junior or William Casper. And other variants.”

“Who was it really?” Nick said harshly.

Cerutti grinned at him. It was a proverbial ear-to-ear grin. “Actually, it was Major General James Nolan,” he said.

Nick’s jaw dropped. Cerutti giggled. “Counting everything,” Nick said, “he must be a fairly filthy son-of-a-bitch.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because my father would never let me meet him.”

“Yes. The General has been a background character for thirty years. But so have I. I made a tremendous amount of money, but I never found myself anyplace where I could spend it.”

“It’s probably just as well.”

“Why?” asked Cerutti quickly, feeling cheated of a main chance to prove his devotion to duty.

“That way you had less of a chance to fuck up. But why did every succeeding scenario conflict with and contradict the one before it?”

“The use of these techniques both personally, as in your case, or upon masses of people—as, for instance, when the techniques are used by politicians—requires that the subject remain confused, that he become exhausted by the unrelenting confusion and, ultimately, hopeless that anything he could ever do, any effort he
might ever make would produce any solution whatever inside his maze. We were, after all—the politicians and I—able to stay ahead of you.”

Nick took a deep breath. He exhaled very slowly. “Professor,” he said, staring into Cerutti’s eyes with loathing, “the police who arrived with me don’t know why they are here, except that they know they are to take Mrs. Malone out. They don’t know who you are or what you’ve done under instructions from my father. I’ll just assume for the time being that you would rather not be hanged or that you would rather be hanged than to go into a building with twelve thousand other prisoners, sleep in a cell with five other men in a three-level bed, the other men sharing you.”

Cerutti became pale. A small tic developed at the corner of his mouth. He had been feeling the pressure, but now he was beginning to understand what pressure was.

“I am prepared to offer you this deal on my own,” Nick said. “If you don’t accept it, these police will take you in. After that no deals can possibly be made, as you can understand, considering the nature of the charges that will be brought against you.”

“Mr. Nicholas Thirkield, I want you to understand something. These records you see all around you are so terribly incriminating to your father, to me and to hundreds of people whom they involve, that this entire building is wired with an explosive charge so tremendous that nothing on this island could live once it is detonated.”

“Very sensible precaution, I’m sure,” Nick said.

“You don’t think I am intimidated by a New York cop flashing his badge?”

“I think you would regret being executed for kidnapping. Let’s put it that way.”

“In short, you are defying me. You are saying to me, ‘Go ahead, Cerutti, blow us all up.’”

“I am counting on you fucking up, Cerutti.”

“What do you mean?” the professor snapped.

“I mean you are very fond of what you like, and you like Cerutti being alive, therefore no crazy idea of my father’s orders to blow this place up would have any effect on you if you had to be blown up with it.”

“What is the deal you are offering me?”

“Tell me everything you know about my brother’s assassination, Professor, and everything that followed it—
everything
. Then I can let you disappear in any way you choose.”

“I’ll accept that. Very kind of you, I’m sure.”

“Not at all. Please don’t thank me. They’ll catch you anyway.”

“I don’t think so,” Cerutti said. “I have been thinking about this for some years.”

“Professor, what was real and what was a scenario?”

Cerutti dialed at the console. The table opened and a tray with a pot of tea and one cup and saucer ascended. Cerutti poured the tea and said, “Captain Heller, Joe Diamond, Turk Fletcher and Willie Arnold were as real as real can be. That guard who beat you up on the fiftieth floor of your father’s building was very real. He was telling you specifically and incontrovertibly that you were to stop.”

“The rest was fantasy?” Nick asked.

“Almost.”

“Except the twenty-four murders.”

“I had nothing to do with those. Furthermore, most of those deaths were only coincidental—people wanted to believe they were connected with the assassination.”

“What did Z. K. Dawson have to do with any of it?”

“Nothing. Dawson was just a mistake of your father’s. He was off Dawson because of an aluminum deal Dawson won about twenty-six years ago, so he thought he’d give Dawson a hard time—create a public scapegoat and pay off an old score. But your father’s mistakes got worse. He decided he wanted to protect Fletcher. He wouldn’t let us find Fletcher. Are you going to tell me that a man who doesn’t even bother to change his own name, who has limited means of earning
a living, who has to be in touch with his centenarian mother and who had an Amarillo accent like a knife sharpener in Indonesia could have gotten away from our people?”

“But, why would Pa—”

“Oh, your father knew where he was. He told General Nolan to give Fletcher a letter of reference, and your father followed Fletcher straight through to Bangladesh and Brunei, but I think he wanted Fletcher alive to keep himself sharp. There was no way for him to get old and flaccid while Fletcher was still alive, and then there was the biggest reason of all, which your father didn’t know himself. He could not stand the guilt of what he had done. He wanted to get caught and he wanted to be punished. Deep, deep down in his mind and in his soul he had put the whole combination together. He knew Fletcher was working for you. Maybe he even told Nolan to tell Fletcher that there would be a safe job for him with you. Then he waited for something to happen that would make Fletcher talk, make Fletcher draw you in, because your father knew absolutely that if you could get pulled into this you would surely turn to him, and with him steering the whole investigation through you, he could force its course and could bring about his own apprehension.”

“Pa was using me to make sure he was punished for what he did to Tim?”

“Yes. But he didn’t know that. And considering all that he had done over fourteen years’ time to cover his tracks, he didn’t have to lay down an order on the first day that you were to be protected—no matter what—that no harm was to come to you. He didn’t have to demand that I bring Lola Camonte into the scenarios. That was getting close to the bone, that was right down at the real issue.”

“Camonte and Frank Mayo were real, then. Just the way the witnesses said they were?”

“Camonte and Mayo are real people, God knows,” Cerutti said. “But except for one section, they were
just characters in the scenarios and therefore unreal. The real part was the tape your father had made about the meeting between Camonte and the President, when the President heard for the first time that your father had stolen the two-million-dollar campaign contribution that had been made through Camonte by the crime industry. All of the rest about Camonte I fabricated, because our science functions in the balance between the real and the fanciful, and that is what makes our scenarios the marvelously effective things they are—the task-force strength of all modern American political action.”

Nick inhaled very deeply again. “Professor”—he sighed helplessly—“did Pa have Tim killed?”

“Yes.”

There was a silence. Nick covered his face with his hands. Then he released them and sat back, staring at Cerutti.

“Your brother knew that your father and his friends had been taking him down the wrong road in the Presidency. For eleven months he had gone along because he could see no way to break with the men who had elected him. Then your father gave him his chance over the issue of the stolen campaign contribution, and the President barred your father and the rest of the oligarchs he could identify from access to the White House and key government offices. He became, so to speak, his own President. When he did that he sealed his death warrant.”

“His death warrant?” Nick cried out. “Who signed it? Who ordered it? Who are these—the rest of the oligarchs Tim barred?”

“The executive committee of the men and women who own this country met and voted. Your brother had to be punished, and a man they could trust had to be moved into the White House in his place. They controlled the CIA, the Secret Service and the FBI, and it was understood that one of these would organize the strike, but your father said it was his right to get that
part of the work done. It was he who had lost your brother in the first instance. It was his job to make it all good and to re-establish himself among his peers. That motion was carried.”

THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 19, 1959—ROCKRIMMON

The two spokesmen for the executive committee arrived at Rockrimmon in a sweet little Jovair that was affected by its pilot. It was a red, white and blue four-seater, tandem-rotor helicopter, with egg-shaped tail fins mounted on outriggers below the rear rotor head. It was supercharged with a 235 horsepower 6A-350 Franklin engine, and it had a range of 200 miles at 105 miles per hour. Its owner-pilot was Francis Manning Winikus, “the grand old man of the CIA,” cultivated, healthy and pink behind his neat white moustache and his twinkling eyeglasses. “The Incomparable Spymaster,” Georges Marton, the espionage chronicler, had called him. His passenger was Dr. Hugh “Horse” Pickering, leader of the Federal Synod of American Churches Pro-Christ, who was heavy-boned, hearty and cunning. The two men were dressed for the country, except that Dr. Pickering wore a black-and-white-checked sports jacket and black slacks and loafers, as befitted his calling, and Winikus wore a blood-red-flecked and -lined tweed jacket with blood-red slacks and kerchief, as befitted his.

Pa and General Nolan were waiting for them at the pad. For the day only, the General wore his full kit: brass glowing, fruit salad bulging, overseas cap at a merry tilt. It had not been the uniform he had worn in World War II. He had gained sixty-one pounds since the old, flat days, but Pa liked him to be dressed out for ceremonial occasions, and the uniform had been measured,
cut and tailored by Welshman in London only five weeks before. Pa wore knickers and a pullover under a heavy overcoat.

They rode to the house in two golf carts under sable throws, Pa riding in the lead cart with Francis Winikus, the General handling the rear guard in the cart with Dr. Pickering. Si had a bowl of hot punch waiting for them. Winikus asked for a Dr. Pepper drink. Dr. Pickering wanted Ovaltine laced with Southern Comfort. General Nolan waded into the hot punch. Pa drank beer.

There was a roaring fire going in the high-manteled, wide fireplace. Standing around it, sipping their drinks, they settled what had gone wrong with the Army-Navy game the previous Saturday. In a little while luncheon was called.

At Dr. Pickering’s curate’s request, Pa had laid on a sound, high-protein meal (because Dr. Pickering did not feel it right for his presbytery to buy and serve proteins openly): jambon persillé, slabs of cold roast beef, cold haricot beans in oil and garlic, and a magnum of 1949 Bonnes Mares. Francis kept them entertained with stories of how he had gotten ITT into France the day before World War II was over, what an advantage it had turned out to be, and how it had all become quite a large pot. Dr. Pickering ate 2.3 pounds of beef, 1.2 pounds of ham, but bypassed the beans. After lunch they went into Pa’s study, with its four five-foot-wide balconies cantilevered high up on the forty-two-foot-high walls to get at the upper books. They sat around the open fire this time, the two visitors on sofas on either side of Pa, Pa in a low, comfortable, calfskin chair. General Nolan was at a desk, making notes to keep up the pretense that the conversations were not being recorded.

Si brought in a glass
cona
of black South African coffee on a battery-operated heating stand. The General passed among them with a bottle of Pelisson cognac
that had been in the cask for thirty years. When Si left, Francis said in his wonderful voice that could speak so many languages, “We are interested to hear your final reactions, Tom.”

Pa stayed impassive. Everything had been handled courteously and skillfully, as though to convey the impression that he really had a choice in the matter—which he did not. The owners of America in plenary session had voted death for Tim unanimously. Pa’s loyalty to himself and to them—call it bushido, call it omertà, call it love of country—now required that Pa re-establish himself for having made the move that had disaffected Tim, rendering the President useless to them. Pa felt no mawkishness about what he would have to do. Tim knew better than most people about what would happen to him once he dared to pull this man-of-the-people stunt. Now it was either Tim or Pa. As far as Pa was concerned, Tim had already stretched him out on the ice as though he were an old Eskimo whose time was up—over a couple of suitcases filled with some lousy campaign money that they used to buy whores and burglars with. He had barred Pa from Washington. He had locked the door on Pa’s mutual owners of the country, and that was ritual murder. Pa could tell himself with total confidence that if Tim had ever had to have him killed, the way Pa now had to have Tim killed, Tim would have done it with a big, toothy grin. All right. If he didn’t get rid of Tim himself, personally, to hold the esteem of the men like Francis Manning Winikus and Hugh Pickering, he would go down. He would be brought down swiftly, efficiently, painlessly and impersonally. If he didn’t insist, as he had, on doing this job himself, it would be the end. So Pa answered Francis imperturbably. “I thought we’d make the move on the twenty-second of February,” he said. “That’s Washington’s Birthday, and the President will be making the traditional visit to the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. We’ll be able to lay out a pretty good plan.”