The Third Bullet - Страница 52

CHAPTER 16

As I said, Sergeant,” said Harry Gardner, “Dad was a man of literature, really. So his books, his private books, were all fiction.”

Swagger once again stood at the threshold of Niles Gardner’s office, that book-lined cave where the CIA’s famous Boswell had tried for thirty years to write novels and failed. He could see the Red Nine lying undisturbed on the desk and the four ceramic bluebirds and the illustration of the six green elm trees on the shelves.

“Well,” said Swagger, “as I say, it’s a long shot. But I noted that beside the pistol, which is sometimes called a Red Nine, there’s that collection of bluebirds, four of ’em, and that picture of elm trees, six of ’em. It occurred to me that somehow the phrases ‘Red Nine,’ ‘Blue Four,’ or ‘Green Six’ might have had some meaning to him, like in some private way he was commemorating them.”

“Wow,” said Harry, “you know, that’s remarkable. I noted those things too, and I thought them strange, but it never occurred to me to put them in a pattern. They were so unlike Dad. He was not a sentimentalist, and those bluebirds in particular are so kitsch that I can’t understand why they’re there. Let’s look at the picture.” He took it down from the wall, handed it to Swagger, then took it back. “Dime-store frame. Let’s see what the picture is.”

He turned it over, unfolded four soft copper flaps securing the mounting board, and shook the board free of the frame. The picture fluttered to the floor. Bob picked it up and discovered that it was folded in such a way to display the six trees, but it was actually an illustration from a Redbook short story entitled “Passion’s Golden Tresses.” Unfolded, it showed a handsome young man chastely embracing a beautiful young blonde against a forest backdrop. The subtitle on the story was “Her Hair Was Beautiful, But Was That All David Loved?” The author was Agnes Stanton Phillips.

“Good Lord,” said Harry. “Now, there’s your classic fifties kitsch!” He turned to Swagger. “You’ve introduced a strangeness to my father that not even I knew existed! What on earth does this mean?”

“It connects with nothing of your father, or his mind, or anything that you can think of?”

“Nothing. I’m astonished. Where’s this going?”

“I found the pistol odd too, in its way. I noted those other things, all with the numbers attached to colors. I thought: Radio call signs, agent names, map coordinates, some kind of color code, all of which could have some connection to intelligence work and might have some bearing somehow on the fake name he cooked up for Hugh Meachum.”

“In other words, if you can decipher the pattern, maybe it’s the same pattern that connects to Hugh. Or the same principle of pattern, is that it?”

“Something like that. I know it’s thin, believe me.”

“Thin or not, it’s fascinating but way beyond me, Sergeant.”

“It could also be nothing. He liked bluebirds. He liked trees. He liked Mausers.”

“But he didn’t like trees. He didn’t like Mausers. He most certainly didn’t like bluebirds, that I can guarantee you, particularly ceramic ones. So maybe you are on to something.”

“If so, I ain’t smart enough to figure it out.”

“I’ll tell you what. You feel free to dig around here. As I say, I’ve been over it all, and I can guarantee you: no porn, no hidden notes from mistresses, no decoded instructions from his secret masters in the Kremlin, no movie scripts, nothing that anyone but a son would find interesting, and even his son didn’t find it that interesting. I am going to leave you alone with Niles Gardner, and if you find anything, more power to you. Do you need coffee, beer, bourbon, wine, a sandwich, anything like that?”

“No sir.”

“The bathroom is down the hall. Feel free to use it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gardner.”

Bob turned and faced the mind, or at least a portion of it, of Niles Gardner. He found it intimidating. It was all books, and most of them Bob had never heard of. But starting at the top left-hand corner of the top left-hand bookshelf-the book was A Death in the Family by James Agee-he began to methodically pull each one out, flip the pages for inserts, bookmarks, underlines, whatever, and work his way through the shelves, going from the As to, finally, the Zs.

It took over three hours, and from the well-thumbed, well-worn condition of the volumes, Swagger could tell that Niles Gardner was a man who loved his novels. Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Orwell, Dickens, Wolfe, Wells, Bellow, Friedman, Golding, Brautigan, Pynchon, Fitzgerald, Crane, Flaubert, Camus, Proust, Wharton, Spillane, Tolkien, Robbins, Wallant, he read passionately and catholically. A classic in a Modern Library edition was apt to be found next to something by Jim Thompson. Kurt Vonnegut and James Gould Cozzens and Lloyd C. Douglas and Herman Wouk and Bernard Malamud and Robert A. Heinlein and Norman Mailer and Anton Myrer and Nicholas Monsarrat and John le Carre and Howard Fast and Irwin Shaw and Robert Ruark and Franz Kafka, all were equally displayed and beloved on the long feet of floor-to-ceiling shelves. On and on it went, and there was no relief from the weary task of unshelving, flipping the pages, reading the comments, then replacing. Occasionally, something would fall to the floor, some kind of long-ago bookmark, like a dry cleaner’s slip or a folded index card or someone’s business card or whatever, and each would indicate a stopping place or a passage of brilliance that Niles had awarded an exclamation point.

Finally, Bob was done. He had come across no oddities, no irregularities, no anomalies. It was just a serious reader’s collection of the best his species had done at the ridiculous effort of telling a long story in prose.

“How’re you coming?” asked Harry, leaning in the doorway.

“I suppose it was a game try, but I didn’t learn a damned thing I didn’t already know, except that the world is sadly full of books I’ll never read.”

“This room makes me feel the same way. I-” He paused. “This probably has nothing to do with anything,” he went on, “but I did find one book hidden away when I was searching. It was nonfiction, old, a first edition. It was strange for Dad to have, and he’d hidden it in the bedroom, in his nightstand, under a pile of magazines. What did I do with it?”

Swagger waited as the internal drama played out in Harry’s head.

“I thought it might be valuable, so I set it aside for an appraisal and then never-” He snapped alert. “Wait here. I put it in the attic, where I have some of Dad’s old suits that I’ve been meaning to give away.”

He turned, and Swagger heard the echoes in the old house as the man bounded up the stairs two flights, then bounded back.

He walked in with his trophy.

“Some kind of obscure Victorian science book, though the author’s name is slightly familiar; I can’t remember from where.”

He handed the heavy volume to Bob. It was The Visions of Sane Persons by Francis Galton. It weighed about three tons.

Swagger turned to the title page and saw that it had been published in 1884.

“It’s got a bookmark,” said Harry.

Swagger cracked the old volume to the page that, sometime in the distant past, Niles Gardner had designated as of special meaning, and found himself at the intersection of pages 730 and 731, where he began to read Frances Galton’s comments on numbers and colors.

I’ll spare you details on the weekend and the pitch I made to Lon and his eventual acceptance. As you may have gathered, I would make a later, tougher pitch to Lon, and that was the dramatic one. I’ll detail it at the proper time.

To sum up, Peggy and I got there around 5, had cocktails, and took him to dinner at his country club, where all knew and loved him. The food was excellent, and he was in good spirits. I could tell the intellectual exercise of solving the problem had energized him. The next morning, he and I went out to his range, and he showed me the rifle he had prepared and the ammunition, and convinced me that it was fine, that it would work. I suppose he knew what would come next. He displayed no surprise at the course the conversation took.

Lon was a big man. That’s why he played fullback; ask the Harvard pansies, they know him well. He watched his weight and worked out his upper body with dumbbells regularly, but he was always fighting the pounds; they seemed to creep on him like fog and cling like putty. He had a square American face, wore wire-rimmed glasses, and kept his hair short, like all of us did without question in 1963. He favored corduroys, chinos, and crewneck sweaters, all well worn, so that he looked like an English professor-again, like we all did in those days. You were an English professor in a rumpled sport coat or an IBM salesman in a sharp dark suit and black tie. That was all there was.

His face was so lively and intelligent that people oftentimes didn’t realize he was moored in that hateful steel chair, S4 forever. He’d gotten awfully good with it over the years, and he may have been the one who invented the wheel ring of smaller circumference than the rubber tire he used to propel himself. He could probably climb a mountain in the thing, or rob a bank, or go up or down stairs. But it got to him, I know it did. His vitality crushed into that metal framework, his liveliness anchored by the great dead wastage of his lower body, his talent frustrated by his immobility.

It took a bit, as it always does when you recruit a solid citizen to go against all that he’s been taught, but I had advantages. I knew he read Lippman in the Post and admired Murrow on CBS and had what might be called “enlightened” social ideas about Negroes and Jews, and while he wanted to destroy communism, he didn’t particularly want to kill anyone doing it, especially not millions of innocent Russian peasants. We all felt that way. And he hated, as did most Ivy League people, General Walker, who seemed part of a long tradition of recent American troglodytes, from Martin Dies to Joe McCarthy to Richard Nixon to the John Birch Society and the Ku Klux Klan, men who saw Commies everywhere and made it much tougher on those of us charged with fighting real Commies, men who hated Negroes and wished them to stay backward and pathetic and never equal under law or in opportunity, men who still hated Jews and thought they secretly controlled everything, men who just hated because that was all they had been taught to do.