Tibetan Cross Page 31

  “Hey, grandmother, wake up!”

  One eye opened. “Leave me sleep, cuntface.”

  “Here.” He tucked the American's money into her horny hand. “Get a meal and a warm bed.”

  “Who are you to tell me? Stick it up your ass!”

  Paul was in the waiting room but Cohen did not approach him; they entered separate cars on the train. “Third couchette,” Paul said when he passed Cohen in the corridor as the train rolled out of Paris. Cohen watched city lights accelerating past the dirty corridor window. A train rushed the other way, shaking the window. He had a sudden fear of being wrong, about Claire, about Paul, himself. “Transition,” the train replied, “repetition, transition, repetition, transition,” its wheels clicking faster, faster, until half-dazed he followed the corridor to Paul's couchette.

  Paul's eyes were hard and black. “Never,” he said, “never will I do anything like that again, robbing that poor helpless shit and terrifying him, taping his arms like that! Never!”

  Cohen sat, head in hands. “I'm sorry. I'm losing track. But if we don't get out of France we'll both be killed. We had to do something.”

  “I paid for both bunks,” Paul said. “You might as well stay.” He reached across and squeezed Cohen's knee.

  “The flics come an hour out of Calais.” Cohen put the passport and the ten photographs on the fold-out table.

  Paul was removing the photo of the American from the passport with the blade of his pocket knife. “You've been to England, France, Germany, and, strangely, Zaire.”

  “Wonder why.”

  “Charles Russell Goodson, Andover, Mass. Born Tennessee, U.S.A., April 1, 1945. You're an April Fool, Charles. Don't forget to memorize this stuff.” Paul began to sort through the photos.

  “That one's best.”

  “Customer's always right.” Paul took the indicated photo and placed it under the one he had cut from the passport, trimming it with his blade. “Now comes the tricky part.” Gently, with the chain ring attachment of his knife, then with the plunger of a ball point pen, he began to duplicate the circle of depressions punched into the surface of the American's photo. “The jerking of this train doesn't make it any easier,” he said after a while.

  “Do your best. It's only my life in your hands.”

  Paul leaned back to survey his work. “Then no doubt this's good enough.” He glued the photo into the passport, blew it dry, and scuffed it a bit over one knee.

  Cohen stared at his picture, the strange dark hair, in the passport with the strange name and signature. “You do this all the time?”

  “Sho nuff. We nigras's born to crime. You should practice signing your name, Charles.”

  “Chuck.”

  “The interesting question is will we hit the States before they learn this is stolen?”

  “The Sûreté won't report it till tomorrow at the earliest.”

  “Say eight a.m. Paris time – or two a.m. New York.”

  “I'll just have to gut it out. You stay away from me at Kennedy Customs, and hope they're not that organized. And hope you don't get picked up, either.”

  NEAR MIDNIGHT the French passport control officers descended on the train. Cohen, back in his own compartment, nodded nonchalantly as the small, mustached officer handed back his passport without comment. “It flew,” he said to Paul, once the Dover boat was beyond the last gossamer lights of France, caught in the wrenching cadence of heavy seas on the English Channel.

  “A good trap, Sam, is one that's easy to slip into.”

  The passport passed muster with the English port police. They took the train into London and the A1 bus from Victoria to Heathrow. At Heathrow they bought two tickets to New York with Charles Russell Goodson's American Express Card. By nine they were over Belfast on a TWA flight to Kennedy. Cohen watched through the window but Ireland's emerald lay veiled in clouds.

  The Kennedy customs man stared at him thoughtfully. “You comin’ back with no luggage?”

  “My father just died. I'm returning to France after the funeral.”

  “Oh. Sorry to hear that. Go ahead.”

  New York's air was damp and warm, smelling of park grass and bus fumes. They took a room near Grand Central. It began to rain; Cohen stared through the streaking window at the flow of umbrellas far below in the street. “We've been gone two years,” he said finally, “but I don't feel home at all.”

  22

  293 FULTON was an unimposing four-story brick building suffering from a century of boredom and neglect, its window sashes rotting quietly, its ripply glass holed here and there by BBs and cornered with spider webs where smog collected like silt on a riverbank. Raveled wires drooped between a creosoted pole and a pipe knocked horizontally through the brick. In a Chinese clothing store on its first floor ladies in multicolored coats argued intently with the balding owner while children ran between the racks on the sidewalk.

  Paul mounted the stairs to the second floor. Cohen fondled the flashy oriental nylons, his eye on the stairs. The quick-talking ladies left, and the owner asked what he wanted.

  “A blouse for my girl.”

  “What size?”

  “She's tall.” Cohen raised his hand over the man's head.

  “That rack in back.”

  “I'll look here for a moment first.”

  “That Chinese coats.”

  “Yes. I'm looking also for my mother. A coat for my mother.”

  “She want Chinese coat?”

  “Yes, she's Chinese.”

  The man tucked his head back on his neck to look up at Cohen. “You mother no Chinese.”

  “Yes…my girl's mother.”

  “You make fun? What you want?”

  “A Chinese coat…” Paul was descending the stairs. “Here she comes now,” Cohen smiled. He followed Paul around the corner, the man staring after them, arms akimbo, on the sidewalk.

  “No Kohler,” Paul said, out of breath. “A Scandinavian woolen place on the third floor, everything else accountants, a Chinese lawyer's, or empty. I asked the girl in the Scandinavian place if they knew Kohler, and she said wait and went into the back office. The ugliest guy in America came out – baggy eyes, nicotined lips, round-shouldered, about fifty, a great sprouting red-haired wart on the tip of his nose. He takes off his bifocals and says who wants to know. I tell him some other place gave me the name. He asks who; I don't remember. He listens to my spiel for a couple minutes, then says Kohler ain't there no more, they went under.”

  Paul licked his lip. “He knows, Sam. I watched him sweat.” Very deliberately, a truck tractor was backing its trailer into a short space in front of them, its air brakes hissing. “A stack on a file cabinet. One of the files said Kohler.”

  Cohen sucked air between his teeth. “Time for a trip to the East Village.”

  “Count me out.”

  “No violence, promise. Persuasion, Paul, I'm talking persuasion.”

  A CROSS-TOWN cab took them to an eroded park at the corner of Avenue A and Seventh Street. A few mothers pushed strollers, guarding their flanks with a hunted air; several teenagers were throwing knives at a bench. “Want to make some money?” Cohen said.

  “Maybe.” One squinted at him, wiping hands on his jeans.

  Cohen sat on the bench. It was splintery and warm. “I don't have much time, so here's my problem. I need a handgun and some acid and speed. I'll pay good. If you guys can help me, fine. Otherwise I'll find somebody else. Anybody who talks to the cops is dead.”

  “You think we're criminals?” said the shortest one, missing front teeth. “We don't talk to cops.”

  “I don't care who you are.” Cohen stood. “Am I wasting my time?”

  “Nobody say that,” the squinting one replied. He glanced across the dead grass at Paul. “Who's that?”

  “My bodyguard.”

  The boys moved away, conversing in Spanish. The short one returned. “Come back this afternoon.”

  “I need them in one hour.”

 
; “Fuck you, man. No can do.”

  “Thanks anyway.” Cohen stepped away.

  “Wait.” More conversation. One boy left, walking quickly.

  “Where's he headed?” Cohen said.

  “Talk to his uncle.”

  They waited. Bongo drums thrummed in another corner of the park. Two girls with long black hair approached; they sat on the bench and smoked a joint with the boys. One offered it to Cohen. “Your friend want some?” Cohen called Paul over but he shook his head. The boy who had left came back. “We go to my uncle.” They crossed Avenue A and turned west on Fifth Street. Ahead an American flag hung from a facade.

  “That's the precinct house,” Cohen said.

  “Easy,” the short one grinned.

  Two old men sat on the front steps of the police station drinking from a paper bag. The boys walked up the steps of the adjoining building. The short one took Cohen's arm. “Here we meet his uncle.”

  “You think I'm crazy?”

  The boy smiled, toothless. “It's the safest place.”

  “Leave them outside.” Cohen pointed to the other boys.

  “With your friend, except Jaime. It's his uncle.”

  They climbed the stinking, narrow stairs. Wads of bloody cotton lay on the third floor landing. Jaime knocked on a fourth floor rear door.

  The room smelt of garbage and roach spray. Behind a door a baby was crying. The uncle was a man in his mid-twenties with a cross-hatched scar on his forehead. In a shoe box he held out a stainless steel .357 Ruger. “Four hundred fifty.”

  “That's too much; it's just a single action.”

  “It's what I've got, friend.”

  “What about the dope?”

  “Fifteen dollars a tab, acid or speed.”

  “The gun's too high. You know that.”

  “You wanted it quick. Quick costs money.”

  “Not when you had it here already. I'll go three hundred on the gun, with twenty rounds ammo.”

  “Shit, man, go to the store and get registered.”

  “You know I can't do that. But I can go back out on the avenues and get a gun right away. You know that, too.”

  “Four hundred. I give you a box of ammo, too.”

  “And throw in five tabs of acid, five of speed.”

  “Four-fifty the whole thing,” the uncle said. He went into the crying baby's room and returned with a box of factory loads and two plastic bags with five capsules each. The Ruger was nearly new. “Police Special,” the uncle said, tossing it gently in his palm. They went down to the first floor landing; Cohen called Paul in to pay. Then Cohen loaded the gun and tucked it in his coat pocket, keeping the ammo and plastic bags in a paper sack.

  ON St. Mark's Place they halted at a brown Plymouth Valiant with three parking tickets under the wiper, its windshield opaque with grime. Paul flicked his knife blade through the cracked weatherstripping and popped up the door button.

  No one passing on the sidewalk seemed to notice through the dirty glass as Paul cut the wires behind the ignition switch, linked two, and touched the third to them. The starter yowled, clacked, and caught. On East Houston Street Paul stopped to remove the parking tickets and clean the windshield. At 11:35 they parked next to a fire hydrant around the corner from 293 Fulton.

  At 12:10 a short, heavy man with red hair left the building and walked toward Broadway. Paul intercepted him at the corner. “Sir, I'm the one who spoke to you before, about a job?”

  “So?”

  “I got one. I'm working for the fellow behind you. He's got a .357 Magnum pointed at your back, and unless you join us for lunch he's going to blow your intestines all over the street.”

  The man stiffened. “I'm not carrying any money.”

  “Lunch is on us, beautiful.” Paul held open the car door, flipping the seat forward. “Keep your hands on the back of the front seat and slide across. My boss wants to slip in beside you.”

  Cohen kept the Magnum on him through the Midtown Tunnel's Correct Change lane, and on the Long Island Parkway till the Jericho exit. Near Oyster Bay Paul parked at a For Sale sign by a field overgrown with sumacs and elms. They entered the sumacs, checked the man for weapons, and sat him on the sandy earth. His face was blanched, with red splotches.

  “Well, Kohler,” Cohen smiled, “this's the end of the line.”

  “Name's not Kohler.”

  “Who's Kohler, then?”

  “It's defunct. We merged, but kept our name. I don't think there ever was a person, Kohler.” The man looked up. “What the hell do you guys care about Kohler?”

  “Enough to let you go if you're straight with us.”

  “You don't want money?”

  “We want to talk about Kohler.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “What did they sell?”

  “They bought. Rugs from Iran, brassware and wool from Turkey – all Middle Eastern stuff.”

  “And from Nepal?”

  “Nothing from there.” The man rubbed his eyes. “Jeez, guys, mind if I smoke?”

  Cohen lifted the cigarettes from the man's breast pocket and placed them out of reach. “He's wasting our time, Paul. Let's give him lunch.” He opened the plastic bags and took a capsule from each. “Truth drugs. They'll make it easy, not being able to say no.”

  The man gagged down the capsules. Cohen tied his wrists to his ankles and waited. After forty minutes he began to sweat and shake, eyes flitting from one to the other.

  “You're a real hippie, now.” Paul untied him. “What time is it, boss?”

  “Two-twenty.” Cohen forced two speed capsules down the man's throat. “If we don't have everything we need to know by three o'clock, Kohler, you're a dead man.”

  By ten to three Cohen had taken the man's belt and was drawing his knife blade back and forth steadily over its machine-stamped western motif. The man sat cross-legged, fingering his empty belt loops. “Can't I please have a cigarette?” he whispered.

  Cohen raised himself to a crouch. “I'll kill you unless you speak!”

  The man went wide-eyed. “It's before my time, but Kohler dealt with Nepal. I don't like to tell you this, but with a wife and family to support, you know, what can I do?” He cocked his head. “Stihl? He's a tall fellow with a beard? I'll bet he stayed in contact with Nepal; he's worked in the Philippines. But I had nothing to do with the Nepal thing.”

  “What was the Nepal thing?” Cohen asked softly.

  “One word, and as God is in Heaven I'll be dead.”

  “Leave out one word and as God's in Heaven you'll be dead.”

  “I'm a gofer, nothing but a clerk. Really…”

  Cohen shook two acid capsules into his palm and showed them to the man. “This is the end of your mind. Do you want to be a vegetable the rest of your life?”

  Paul fished a photo of a slender, chinless youth from the man's wallet. “You'll never even recognize your sweetheart again, let alone get off with him. And he won't want you.” He held up a New York driver's license. “Yes, Chester, it'll be the end.” He put down the license and opened the wallet further, pulling out a New Jersey license. “Ah, it's Arthur I'm speaking to now, or are you both? How patriotic.”

  “It's two-fifty-seven,” Cohen said. “Time to go.”

  “What was the Nepal thing, Chester?” Paul tugged the man's sleeve.

  The man was shivering like jelly in a vibrator, flushing up into his red hair, pouching his liverish lips, Cohen thought, like a catfish out of water. Cohen placed a hand on the matted red hairs of his wrist. “Look, Chester,” he said, “please try to be helpful. We have no quarrel with you. We want the ones you work for.” He smiled. “Simple as that!”

  The man looked at him hopefully. Cohen cocked the Ruger's hammer, the man jumping at the sound. “Okay, Chester Arthur, you have thirty seconds to explain Nepal.”

  “Stihl took the orders, from over there. I passed them, up the ladder, you know.”

  “What orders?”

  “Types and quantit
ies. Say, fifty AK 47's, so many sidearms, so many crates of grenades, Johnny Jump Ups, you name…”

  “Johnny Jump Ups?”

  “A little fragger, you know, jumps to chest height and goes off, when someone comes near it. Good for gooks.”

  Paul chuckled. “I don't know that term, Chester. What's a gook?”

  “Oh, you know – somebody with slanty eyes – an Asian – not one of us.”

  Paul smiled, stretching his fingers together. “Like in Vietnam?”

  “Yeah – right.”

  “And you sent out those things – those Jump Ups – to kill gooks.”

  “I don't touch the stuff. A little office, that's all I do, have a little office. Stihl's the one you want, not me; I'm just the contact. I just run a little…”

  “Stihl's dead, Chester.” Cohen shook a cigarette from the man's pack, handed it to him. “So where's this stuff go?”

  “Like to fight commies, leftists, that bunch. Some to Tibet. At least it used to, when the Agency was outfitting them.”

  “Agency?”

  “CIA.”

  “Was?”

  “Now, I think, someone else's paying. Please, fella, can I have a light?”

  Cohen lit the match but blew it out. “Who?”

  “Don't know.” The man shivered. “The process is the same.”

  “That's you, isn't it, Chester – the Agency. Isn't it?”

  “Well I'm – I mean I was – I mean there never was any proof who it was…”

  “Who what was?”

  “Who set us up, you know…I mean, I always thought… You see, it was never clear. The State Department, too…”

  “The State Department?”

  “Yeah. You know, how it's really the same, at the top, State and the Agency. State has its own intelligence group, and part of that's Agency people, and then the Agency helps them, and they help the Agency. Like everybody knows, some of the top people in State are really Agency people… have always been Agency people, in State.”

  “What about the bomb?”

  “What bomb?”

  “Take out the pills, Paul.”

  “The thing for Tibet that went wrong, that's what you mean? It was a surveillance station. For surveillance on the Chinese. It came through the other way.”