He backed his truck into the garage beside a house. It was very quiet when he turned off the motor. There was only the wind, whistling through the scattered, windowless houses. Logan was loading a stack of Sheetrock into his truck when he heard the airplane.
The red four-seater Cessna made two low passes over the village. Looking downhill through the trees, Logan saw it settle toward the dirt road in the strip mine. If Logan had appreciated such things, he would have enjoyed watching a superb cross-wind landing; a sideslip, a flare-out, and the little plane rolling smoothly with dust blowing off to one side.
He scratched his head and his behind. Now what could they want? Company inspectors maybe. He could say he was checking the village. The plane had rolled out of sight behind a thick grove. Logan worked his way cautiously down through the trees. When he could see the airplane again it was empty, and the wheels were chocked. He heard voices through the trees to his left and walked quietly in that direction. A big empty barn was over there with a three-acre feedlot beside it. Logan knew very well that it contained nothing worth stealing. Watching from the edge of the woods, he could see two men and a woman in the feedlot, ankle deep in bright green winter wheat.
One of the men was tall and wore sunglasses and a ski jacket. The other was darker and had a mark on his face. The men unrolled a long piece of cord and measured a distance from the side of the barn out into the feedlot. The woman set up a surveyor’s transit and the tall man sighted through it while the dark one made marks on the barn wall with paint. The three gathered around a clipboard, gesturing with their arms.
Logan stepped out of the woods. The swarthy one saw him first and said something Logan couldn’t hear.
“What are you folks doing out here?”
“Hello,” the woman said, smiling.
“Have you got any company identification?”
“We’re not with the company,” the taller man said.
“This is private property. You’re not allowed out here. That’s what I’m out here for, to keep people off.”
“We just wanted to take a few pictures,” the tall man said.
“There ain’t nothing to take pictures of out here,” Logan said suspiciously.
“Oh, yes, there is,” the woman said. “Me.” She licked her lips.
“We’re shooting a cover for what you might call a private kind of magazine—you know, a daring sort of magazine?”
“You talking about a nudie book?”
“We prefer to call it a naturist publication,” the tall man said. “You can’t do this sort of thing just anywhere.”
“I might get arrested,” the woman said, laughing. She was a looker all right.
“It’s too cold for that stuff,” Logan said.
“We’re going to call the picture ‘Goose Bumps.’ ”
Meanwhile, the swarthy one was unrolling a spool of wire from the tripod to the trees.
“Don’t you fool with me now. I don’t know anything about this. The office never said anything to me about letting anybody in here. You’d better go on back where you came from.”
“Do you want to make fifty dollars helping us? It will only take a half hour and we’ll be gone,” the tall man said.
Logan considered a moment. “Well, I won’t take off my clothes.”
“You won’t have to. Is there anyone else around here?”
“No. Nobody for miles.”
“We’ll manage just fine then.” The man was holding out fifty dollars. “Does my hand offend you?”
“No, no.”
“Why are you staring at it then?” The woman shifted uncomfortably beside the tall man.
“I didn’t mean to,” Logan said. He could see his reflection in the man’s sunglasses.
“You two get the big camera from the plane, and this gentleman and I will get things ready.” The swarthy man and the woman disappeared into the woods.
“What’s your name?”
“Logan.”
“All right, Mr. Logan, if you’ll get a couple of boards and put them down in the grass right here at the center of the barn wall for the lady to stand on.”
“Do what?”
“Put some boards there, right in the middle. The ground is cold and we want her feet up out of the grass where they will show. Some people like feet.”
While Logan found the boards, the tall man removed the transit and fastened a peculiar-looking curved object to the tripod. He turned and called to Logan. “No, no. One board on top of the other.” He made a frame with his hands and squinted through it. “Now stand on it and let me see if it’s right. Hold it right there. Don’t move. Here they come with the viewfinder.” The tall man disappeared into the trees.
Logan reached up to scratch his head. For an instant his brain registered the blinding flash, but he never heard the roar. Twenty darts shredded him and the blast slammed him back against the barn wall.
Lander, Fasil, and Dahlia came running through the smoke.
“Ground meat,” Fasil said. They turned the slack body over and examined the back. Rapidly, they took pictures of the barn wall. It was bowed in and looked like a giant colander. Lander went inside the barn. Hundreds of small holes in the wall admitted points of light that freckled him as his camera clicked and clicked again.
“Very successful,” Fasil said.
They dragged the body into the barn, sloshed gasoline over it and over the dry wood around it, and poured a trail of gasoline out the door for twenty yards. The fire flashed inside and lit the pools of gas with a whump they felt on their faces.
Black smoke rose from the barn as the Cessna climbed out of sight.
“How did you find that place?” Fasil asked, leaning forward from the rear seat to be heard over the engine noise.
“I was hunting dynamite last summer,” Lander said.
“Do you think the authorities will come soon?”
“I doubt it. They blast there all the time.”
16
EDDIE STILES SAT BY THE window in the New York City Aquarium snack bar worrying. From his table he could see Rachel Bauman below him and forty yards away at the rail of the penguin pen. It was not Rachel Bauman who disturbed him; it was the two men standing with her. Stiles did not like their looks at all. The one on her left looked like Man Mountain Dean. The other one was a little smaller, but worse. He had the easy, economical movements and the balance that Eddie had learned to fear. The predators in Eddie’s world had moved that way. The expensive ones. Very different from the muscle the shylocks employed, the blocky hard guys with their weight on their heels.
Eddie did not like the way this man’s eyes swept over the high places, the roof of the shark house, the fences on the dunes between the Aquarium and the Coney Island board-walk. One slow sweep and then the man quartered the grounds going over it minutely, infantry style, from close to far, and all the time wagging his finger over an interested penguin’s head.
Eddie was sorry he had chosen this place to meet. On a weekday the crowd was not big enough to give him that comfortable, anonymous feeling.
He had Dr. Bauman’s word that he would not be involved. She had never lied to him. His life, the life he was trying to build, was based on what he had learned about himself with Dr. Bauman’s help. If that was not true, then nothing was true. He drained his coffee cup and walked quickly down the stairs and around to the whale tank. He could hear the whale blowing before he reached the tank. It was a forty-foot female killer whale, elegant with her gleaming black and white markings. A show was under way. A young man stood on a platform over the water holding up a fish in the pale winter sunshine. The surface of the water bulged in a line across the pool as beneath the surface the whale came like a black locomotive. She cannoned vertically out of the water and her great length seemed to hang in the air as she took the fish in her triangular teeth.
Eddie heard the applause behind him as he went down the steps to the underground gallery with its big plate-glass windows. The room was dim an
d damp, lit by the sun shining down through the blue-green water of the whale tank. Eddie looked into the tank. The whale was moving over the light-dappled bottom, rolling over and over, chewing. Three families came down the stairs and joined him. They all had loud children.
“Daddy, I can’t see.”
The father hoisted the boy to his shoulders, bumping his head on the ceiling, then took him outside squalling.
“Hi, Eddie,” Rachel said.
Her two companions stood on the far side of her, away from Eddie. That was good manners, Eddie thought. Goons would have come up on either side. Cops would have, too. “Hello, Dr. Bauman.” His eyes flicked over her shoulder.
“Eddie, this is David and this is Robert.”
“Pleased to make your acquaintance.” Eddie shook their hands. The big one had a piece under his left arm, no doubt about it. Maybe the other guy had one too, but the coat fit better. This David. Enlarged knuckles on the first two fingers and the edge of his hand like a wood rasp. He didn’t get that learning to yo-yo. Dr. Bauman was a very wise and understanding woman, but there were some things she did not know about, Eddie thought. “Dr. Bauman, I’d like to talk to you a second, uh, personal if you don’t mind.”
At the other end of the chamber, he spoke close to her ear. Yelling children covered his voice. “Doc, I want to know—do you really know these guys? I know you think you do, but I mean know them? Dr. Bauman, these are some very hard guys. There are, you know, hard guys and hard guys. This is a thing I happen to know about. These are the harder type of hard guy, rather than mugs, if you follow me. These don’t look like no fuzz to me. I can’t see you around these type of fellows. You know, unless they were kin to you or something like that you can’t do anything about.”
Rachel put her hand on his arm. “Thanks, Eddie. I know what you’re saying. But I’ve known these two for a long time. They’re my friends.”
A porpoise had been put in the tank with the whale to provide her company. It was busy hiding pieces of fish in the drain while the whale was distracted by the trainer. The whale slid by the underwater window, taking a full ten seconds to pass by, its small eye looking through the glass at the people talking on the other side.
“This guy I hear about, Jerry Sapp, did a job in Cuba a couple of years ago,” Stiles told Kabakov. “Cuba! He ran in under the coastal radar close to Puerta Cabanas with some Cubans from Miami.” Stiles looked from Kabakov to Rachel and back again. “They had some business on shore, you know, they ran in through the surf in one of these inflatables, like an Avon or a Zodiac, and they came off with this box. I don’t know what the hell it was, but this guy didn’t come back to Florida. He got into it with a Cuban patrol boat out of Bahia Honda and ran straight across to Yucatán. Had a big bladder tank on the foredeck.”
Kabakov listened, tapping his fingers on the rail. The whale was quiet now, resting on the surface. Her great tail arched down, dropping her flukes ten feet below the surface.
“These kids are driving me nuts,” Eddie said. “Let’s move.”
They stood in the dark corridor of the shark house, watching the long gray shapes endlessly circling, small bright fish darting between them.
“Anyway, I had always wondered how this guy ran in close to Cuba. Since the Bay of Pigs they got radar you wouldn’t believe. You said your guy slipped away from the Coast Guard radar. Same thing. So I asked around a little, you know, about this Sapp. He was in Sweeney’s in Asbury Park there, about two weeks ago. But nobody’s seen him since. His boat’s a thirty-eight-foot sportfisherman, a Shing Lu job. They’re built in Hong Kong, and I mean built. This one’s all wood.”
“Where did he keep his boat?” Kabakov asked.
“I don’t know. Nobody seemed to know. I mean, you can’t ask too close, you know? But look, the bartender at Sweeney’s takes messages for this guy, I think he could get in touch. If it was business.”
“What kind of business would he go for?”
“Depends. He has to know he’s hot. If he went himself on this job you’re interested in, of course he knows he’s hot. If it was a contract job, if he let out the boat, then he was listening to the Coast Guard frequency the whole time. Wouldn’t you?”
“Where would you run, if you were this man?”
“I would have watched the boat for a day after it was back, to make sure it wasn’t staked out. Then if I had a place to work I’d paint it, put the legit registration back on and change it up—I’d put a tuna tower on it. I’d catch a string of Gold Platers running south to Florida along the ditch and I’d get right in with ‘em—a string of yachts going down the Intra-coastal Waterway,” Eddie explained. “Those rich guys like to go in a pack.”
“Give me a high-profit item away from here that would make him surface,” Kabakov said. “Something that would require the boat.”
“Smack,” Eddie said, with a guilty glance toward Rachel. “Heroin. Out of Mexico into, say, Corpus Christi or Aransas Pass on the Texas coast. He might go for that. There would have to be some front money, though. And he would have to be approached very careful. He would spook easy.”
“Think about the contact, Eddie. And thank you,” Kabakov said.
“I did it for the doc.” The sharks moved silently in the lighted tank. “Look, I’m gonna split now. I don’t want to look at these things anymore.”
“I’ll meet you back in town, David,” Rachel said.
Kabakov was surprised to see a kind of distaste in her eyes when she looked at him. She and Eddie walked away together, their heads bent, talking. Her arm was around the little man’s shoulders.
Kabakov would have preferred to keep Corley out of it. So far, the FBI agent knew nothing of this business of Jerry Sapp and his boat. Kabakov wanted to pursue it alone. He needed to talk to Sapp before the man wrapped himself in the Constitution.
Kabakov did not mind violating a man’s rights, his dignity, or his person if the violation provided immediate benefits. The fact of doing it did not bother him, but the seed within him that was nourished by the success of these tactics made him uneasy.
He felt himself developing contemptuous attitudes toward the web of safeguards between the citizen and the expediency of investigation. He did not try to rationalize his acts with catchphrases like “the greater good,” for he was not a reflective man. While Kabakov believed his measures to be necessary—knew that they worked—he feared that the mentality a man could develop in their practice was an ugly and dangerous thing, and for him it wore a face. The face of Hitler.
Kabakov recognized that the things he did marked his mind as surely as they marked his body. He wanted to think that his increasing impatience with the restraints of the law were entirely the result of his experience, that he felt anger against these obstacles just as he felt stiffness in old wounds on winter mornings.
But this was not entirely true. The seed of his attitudes was in his nature, a fact he had discovered years ago near Tiberias, in Galilee.
He was en route to inspect some positions on the Syrian border when he stopped his jeep at a well on a mountainside. A windmill, an old American Aermotor, pumped the cold water out of the rock. The windmill creaked at regular intervals as the blades slowly revolved, a lonely sound on a bright and quiet day. Leaning against his jeep, the water still cool on his face, Kabakov watched a flock of sheep grazing above him on the mountainside. A sense of aloneness pressed around him and made him aware of the shape and position of his body in these great tilted spaces. And then he saw an eagle, high, riding a thermal, wingtip feathers splayed like fingers, slipping sideways over the mountain’s face, his shadow slipping fast over the rocks. The eagle was not hunting sheep, for it was winter and there were no lambs among them, but it was above the sheep and they saw it and baaed among themselves. Kabakov became dizzy watching the bird, his horizontal reference distorted by the mountain slope. He found himself holding on to the jeep for balance.
And then he realized that he loved the eagle better than the she
ep and that he always would and that, because he did, because it was in him to do it, he could never be perfect in the sight of God.
Kabakov was glad that he would never have any real power.
Now, in an apartment in a cliff face in Manhattan, Kabakov considered how the bait could be presented to Jerry Sapp. If he pursued Sapp alone, then Eddie Stiles had to make the contact. He was the only person Kabakov knew who had access to crime circles along the waterfront. Without him, Kabakov would have to use Corley’s resources. Stiles would do it for Rachel.
“No,” Rachel said at breakfast.
“He would do it if you asked him. We could cover him all the time—”
“He’s not going to do it, so forget it.”
It was hard to believe that twenty minutes before, she had been so warm and morning-rosy over him, her hair a gentle pendulum that brushed his face and chest.
“I know you don’t like to use him, but Goddamn it—”
“I don’t like me using him, I don’t like you using me. I’m using you, too, in a different way that I haven’t figured out yet. It’s okay, our using each other. We have something besides that and it’s good. But no more Eddie.”
She was really splendid, Kabakov thought, with the flush creeping out of the lace and up her neck.
“I can’t do it. I won’t do it,” she said. “Would you like some orange juice?”
“Please.”
Reluctantly, Kabakov went to Corley. He gave him the information on Jerry Sapp. He did not give the source.
Corley worked on the bait for two days with the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs. He spent an hour on the telephone to Mexico City. Then he met with Kabakov in the FBI’s Manhattan office.
“Anything on the Greek?”
“Not yet,” Kabakov said. “Moshevsky is still working the bars. Go on with Sapp.”
“The Bureau has no record on a Jerry Sapp,” Corley said. “Whoever he is, he’s clean under that name. Coast Guard registration does not have him. Their files are not cross-indexed on boat type down to the detail we need. The paint we have will do for positive comparison, but tracing origin is another matter. It’s not marine paint. It’s a commercial brand of semi-gloss over a heavy sealer, available anywhere.”