Billy John had taken orders from the Dawson family for over thirty years. Z. K. Dawson did not encourage independent thinking and neither did his daughter. Billy John had never thought himself to be very bright, but he knew enough to know that these two were just about the most brilliant people who ever lived. The kind of money they had proved it. This little ole girl might be Number Two Thousand in the line of people who said Tim Kegan ought to be shot, but it was characteristic of the Dawson leadership that she was going to be the first one to do something about it.
“What can I do to help?” he asked.
“Remember when Neiman’s had that Italian Week and we all came down here and one Sunday we were out to Judge Sissons’ spread and they had that big-money rifle competition?”
“Sure do.”
“Remember the shooter who won just about everything? Shooter name of Turk Fletcher?”
“Sure do.”
“You go on and find him and see if he’d like to make a day’s pay shooting for us.”
After Billy John left she stayed in the apartment shooting vitamins and thinking real hard. She had to get some inside help. She knew from all the newspapers that he was going to Philadelphia and the Liberty Bell on Washington’s Birthday. She decided that, no matter what else, the advance man was going to have to lean a whole lot on the Philadelphia city police, because they were the ones who would know how to take him the best way from the airport and into the city and out again. She had to get to know a key Philadelphia cop, that’s all. She’d have to put the problem to him with a large piece of cash money. She had to know from an inside man like that where the best place would be along the route for Turk Fletcher to wait to pick him off. Lola knew everybody. She called Lola.
“Sweetheart, can you introduce me to a real important policeman in Philadelphia?” she asked. “Not me personally but a friend of mine name of Billy John Casper?”
“I could ask around.”
“Sure would appreciate it.”
“What do you need it for?”
She was stacked to the eyelids with the special vitamins, so she didn’t mind saying, “Nobody can expect me to take what he has been saying about me. He’s going to be in Philadelphia on the twenty-second of February and I’m going to do something about it.”
“Give me a couple of hours. Where are you, honey, so I can call you right back?”
It took Lola closer to four hours, because Frank Mayo was out of the office. “You’re okay, honey,” Lola said when she called back. “Tell your man to see a fella name of Joe Diamond who runs the Casino Latino in Philly. Police are his business. He expects a call. Whoever calls, tell him to say Frank Brown.”
Billy John saw Joe Diamond in Philadelphia. Diamond sent him to see Captain Heller. When all the business arrangements were worked out, Billy John brought Turk Fletcher up from Dallas and together they all murdered the President in exchange for Z. K. Dawson’s daughter’s money.
THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 7, 1974—NEW YORK
When Pa finished talking in the enormous twelve-window office, they sat silent. Nick stared at the floor. He understood why Yvette had refused to marry him, but he couldn’t understand how a girl who could look straight out into anything the way she could look and who could laugh the way she laughed could ever have had a whole, different shadow soul nailed onto her, a soul made of lead and pain that she dragged behind her wherever she went.
He forced himself to stand. He walked slowly, swaying, to the wall bar and poured whiskey into a glass. The bottle clanked rhythmically against the crystal like a drummer making a set of rim shots. He tried to bring the glass to his mouth, but his hand was shaking too badly. He spilled it over the front of his shirt. At last he got part of the enormous shot down, then he walked across the room to Pa’s john and was sick. When he came out, colorless and haunted, he said, “Where is she now, Pa?”
“She’s dead.”
“Dead?” He held onto the back of a sofa, with his eyes tight shut. He would never see Yvette again. He would never see her again, and everything went into collision inside his mind, stopping him from thinking anything except that she was dead.
“I’m very sorry, Nick.”
Nick slumped down upon the sofa and gripped his face in his hands.
“Who killed her, Pa?”
“She killed herself. She put a bullet through her head.”
“When?”
“Sometime last night. She’s lying in the city morgue right now.”
“Pa?” Nick lifted his head out of his hands and stared at his father. “How do you know she’s in the morgue? How do you know she shot herself?” Nick could see his father so hazily, in such distortion, that he knew he must be weeping.
“My people are connected. They flooded the police departments with the picture we got at the hotel and the picture we picked up from Commissioner Frey. I put out a five-thousand-dollar reward for information. A morgue attendant collected it this morning when the police brought the body in.”
“I want to see her.”
“Of course. We’ll call ahead. They’ll be expecting you.”
“Pa—that isn’t enough! How did you know she was dead?”
“We read the note she left for you at the Walpole.”
“The kidnap note?”
“Yes.”
“She left it?”
“Yes, she left it. Zendt read it and called me. I decided she was going to disappear the worst way. That she was going to kill herself.”
“I—Jesus!”
“I’m sorry, Nick.”
“What a mess. What a terrible mess.” He turned toward the door. “I have to see her.”
“The name is Mrs. Luigi Debole,” Pa said. “Nick!”
Nick turned to face his father. “I never had even the wildest notion that she meant this much to you, that feeling like this could build up in such a short time. But no matter what, kiddo, we’ve got to keep realizing that a certain kind of justice did triumph here, because Z. K. Dawson was struck in his heart this morning the way I was struck when I got the news that Tim had been cut down.”
“Fuck you and Z. K. Dawson, Pa,” Nick said. “You’re both the disease of this world.”
***
Nick stood in front of Pa’s building below the gigantic flag, looking up Park Avenue with his arm in the air until a cab stopped in front of him. He told the driver to take him to the city morgue.
Pa’s people had called ahead. He was taken directly to the body without any delay. The attendant rolled the drawer open. He saw the bare feet with the tagged toe come out first, then he made himself move his eyes up along the sheet, and after an agony of effort, made himself look at the head.
He was staring down into Chantal Lamers’ dead face. He stared. He blinked. As he blinked, everything seemed to fall into place. He understood where the mistake had been made, and he knew to the last drop of blood what the mistake was going to cost. He felt as if he now held a map in his hands, a map that was going to lead him directly to Tim’s murderer, Chantal’s murderer, and the murderer of twenty-two other people who had just happened to get in the way. More than that, more than anything else, he knew where to find Yvette.
When he left the morgue he dropped a fifty-dollar bill on the driver’s lap, realizing that it was the first extravagant thing he had ever done in his life.
“What the hell is that?” the driver said.
“That’s for taking me to good news,” Nick said. “Now take me to a phone booth.”
He called Keifetz. “Did you get the photograph in Philadelphia?”
“Right here.”
“Is your brother the cop still in good shape?”
“He’s a real jock,” Keifetz said. “He keeps in shape to watch pro football on television.”
“Where is he?”
“Right here in front of the set.”
“Can he take the weekend off?”
“I’ll ask him.” Keifetz was back on the phone immediately. “Sure. H
e can take the weekend. What’s up?”
“Meet me at the Park Avenue entrance in fifteen minutes,” Nick said. “Bring the picture, and tell your brother to bring his badge and gun.”
Keifetz’ brother Alvin didn’t talk very much, and he had spent a lot of time in his life practicing looking menacing. Never had a man mastered his art as well as Alvin. Nick stared at the photograph that Captain Heller’s concealed camera had taken of William Casper, a/k/a Casper Junior, a/k/a Billy John Casper, a/k/a Hilliard Casper II. It was a face he could have described in his sleep: round and fat, with faithful-dog eyes and white hair—a broad part showing a lot of pink skin—hair curving down over his forehead as though his was the hand that had shaken the hand of John L. Sullivan. Nick could imagine the face at any time of its life, because although it had been corrupted by age, it had not been matured by it. It was still the face of a boy—eager, untested, immature, untouched by empathy or feeling.
His earlier elation had turned into euphoria. Yvette had been condemned, ruined, doomed, killed and resurrected, saved, cleansed and restored to him all on the same morning. As Pa had predicted, justice, an unexpected justice, might even triumph, but first he wanted to retrieve Yvette whole and unharmed before he turned away to collect eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth. They drove to La Guardia. While Keifetz and his brother Alvin chartered a two-engine jet, Nick went to a telephone and called Keith Lee at the Riverside Hospital in California.
THURSDAY AFTERNOON FEBRUARY 7, 1974—APOSTLES
The two-engine jet flew them to Ashland, Wisconsin. The Fairchild-Hiller FH-1100, a utility five-seater helicopter, had been flown up from Chicago and was waiting to take them out to Schrader Island pad. They were set down beside Professor Cerutti’s big house in twelve minutes’ time. There was a short scuffle. A guard with a machine rifle told them they were trespassing. Nick identified himself, but it didn’t seem to mean anything to the guard, so Alvin knocked him down and disarmed him so he wouldn’t lose his head.
With Alvin carrying the rifle, the three men walked around the large, pink box, a copy of a late Georgian house, and kept walking to the long, low laboratory building where much of Pa’s power was stored. Professor Cerutti was annoyed to see them. They went into the enormous file room. Professor Cerutti was at his writing center in view of the door. When he saw them he exploded. “Look here, Thirkield,” he said coldly, “I don’t know what the hell you think you are doing here, but you are not here at my invitation, and you are most distinctly not welcome.”
“We’ve come for Yvette Malone,” Nick said.
“Did your father send you for her?”
“No,” Nick said.
“You mean you yourself deduced that Miss Malone was here?”
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Nick said, unsmiling, “considering all the blunders you made.” If Cerutti’s sense of superiority was his self-image, the mirror held up to his tiny world, Nick had decided this would be the quickest way, perhaps the only way, to break him down. The statement inflamed Cerutti. He gasped at the size of the insult. His face became mottled. “Blunders?” he said with outraged incredulity. “What are you talking about—blunders?”
“Tell us where Miss Malone is, then you and I can talk about that.”
“She’s in the main house. Who are these men?”
“New York Police Department,” Nick said.
Alvin flashed his badge. Keifetz tried to look as mean as Alvin.
“Call the main house,” Alvin said to Cerutti. “Tell them we’re on our way. Tell them to watch their manners.” Cerutti telephoned the main house and gave instructions. Alvin and Keifetz left.
Professor Cerutti, trembling with rage, led Nick to the facing sofas at the far end of the building. They sat down opposite each other. “What blunders?” Cerutti said.
“You mean you’d like to hear the worst blunder first, I guess. It has to do with Z. K. Dawson’s daughter, Professor. In your most recent scenario for my father you killed the wrong woman.”
“Do you mean Lamers?” Cerutti said with disdain. “I knew Lamers wasn’t Dawson’s daughter. But I also knew you knew nothing about Dawson, had never met him, and were absolutely ready to accept any plausible woman as his daughter—so what are you talking about?”
“I am going to marry Yvette Malone.”
“Really? How nice for you.”
“Yvette Malone is Z. K. Dawson’s only daughter.”
Cerutti’s face puckered. It began to fold in upon itself—a dutiful company man’s mock-up of his employer’s face when in crisis, Nick thought. For a moment it seemed possible that he was going to cry, but he recovered as he stared at Nick with bulging eyes like wet grapes and said, “His daughter?”
“This morning my father told me the story you had written for him. The rousing scenario about Mrs.—I mean Signora—Luigi Debole, and all the while he told it he was thinking about Chantal Lamers and I was thinking about Yvette. We were talking and threatening and weeping about two different women, Professor. He didn’t know Yvette, really didn’t know she was alive, much less that she was Z. K. Dawson’s daughter. He meant Lamers, so he thought I meant Lamers. He thought I had fallen in love with Lamers. I mean it was just about the lousiest piece of staff work and research anybody ever handed his boss. I mean it is such a lousy piece of staff work that it is going to hang you or electrocute you or whatever it is they are going to do to you, because you are cooked, Professor Cerutti. When I went to that morgue in New York and looked down at Chantal Lamers, baby, I knew you were cooked.”
“Cooked? Hanged? Me? You are mistaken, Mr. Thirkield. I did nothing. I killed no one. All I did was to make up scenarios. I gave your father some perfectly harmless stories. It is a method we developed many, many years ago. In business, as in all other life situations, people tend to accept the plausible if it is wondrously documented; they definitely tend to believe what they want to believe. We stumbled on this system when your father wanted to take over a certain large corporation, but his way was blocked by the company president and two members of their board. Your father said to me—this is almost thirty-five years ago, Mr. Nicholas Thirkield—if he could only get something on those men, he could use it as a lever to pry them out of their places, and I told him I would think about it. I did. I decided that in our modern society truths did not matter. The illusion of truth, the appearance of truth, indeed, let us say the application of the techniques of fiction playing like searchlights upon a fancied façade of truth, would entirely suffice. We pioneered these methods in modern society, we did it—until today, as we see, our politicians and political structure could not exist without them. Life and truth have been turned into diverting, gripping, convincing scenarios, Nicholas Thirkield. All they require is a command of an extensive research facility and a fixed target upon which to project the new truth.”
“The New Truth,” Nick murmured.
“Communications has come a long, long way from Dr. Goebbels, the father of our science.”
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 ch
ance 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.”