The Whisper of the Axe Read online

  On the morning of the seventeenth of March, while the St. Patrick’s Day parade was raging in New York and Boston, after twelve marvelous days of R&R with Enid in Hong Kong, Bart’s special identification status aircraft was ambushed by a band of ignorant Pathet Lao guerrillas who had never taken the trouble to understand special identification status. As Bart stepped down from his Chinook onto USAID Strip No. 42 at Nam Kheum, after the Thai troops had been deployed to make sure everything was secure, Bart’s left kneecap was shattered by a Pathet Lao bullet. “I swear you’d think they were waiting for me,” he told Enid much later.

  “But why should they be waiting to shoot you,” Enid asked indignantly, “the only CIA manager who ever brought real prosperity to this region?”

  The Chinook left the Thai troops at Nam Kheum and flew Bart out immediately to the nearest U.S. Army Base Hospital at Quang Tri in South Vietnam. The hospital was deep within the war zone but, as per their contract with the Simmses, the agency flew Enid across the mountains from Muang Phayao to be with her brother.

  The pain was bad. Enid held his hand tightly, staring desperately into his eyes, pleading with her eyes not to feel the pain or, somehow, to transfer the pain to herself. After the first operation (there would be twenty-three), because she was there to make him feel safe and because of the salvation in the morphine of his own manufacture, Bart relaxed into some limbo while Enid read Jane Austen aloud to him.

  “Did you get word to Uncle Herbert?” he whispered.

  “Yes, darling.”

  “Is he working on moving me into Spider?”

  “Everything is being taken care of, darling.”

  “Those Pathet Lao solved everything,” Bart murmured.

  “Those Pathet Lao may have transferred you right into the White House, sweetheart,” Enid said. She kissed him softly on the temple, the forehead, then on the lips. “We’re going back to Langley, dear,” she said.

  The agency flew Bart and Enid back to Washington as soon as the doctors would allow it. Bart spent a ghastly year at Walter Reed in surgery and rehabilitation, with a CIA substitute surgeon and anesthetist standing by in the operating rooms in case the patient began to “talk deliriously,” at which point all other personnel would have to leave the room regardless of the stage of the operation. Bart would walk stiff-legged for the rest of his life but, as Enid told him earnestly, that would give him a certain novelty, a distinction as a politician. Sometimes the pain was quite bearable. It depended on the weather, Enid told him, but the very best day for his knee was when Enid marched Uncle Herbert into the hospital room and Bart listened to Uncle Herbert say that he had just come from seeing Mr. Ehrlichmann at the White House where final arrangements had been made for Bart’s transfer to the job as Assistant Curator at Spider. “The plain fact, Bart,” Uncle Herbert said, “is that the agency indicated they’ll be darned glad to have you there.”

  Bart and Enid spent the last two weeks before he reported to Langley at White Sulphur Springs. They had a marvelous time. When they got back to Washington, they discovered that Uncle Herbert had arranged to get them a really sweet little house in Georgetown. Although Uncle Herbert sort of pretended he was lending them the house, it wasn’t really his. It was government property, a CIA laboratory house, wired for tape recording and sound transmission, equipped with still and sound motion picture cameras that worked behind one-way mirrors or through apertures in all rooms throughout the house. During the time Bart worked at Spider, and he and Enid lived in the house, they were under the agency’s surveillance every minute.

  Bart’s imagination of what the Spider archive must be like had fallen short by 70 percent. The files were the most protean, personal, preternaturally prying records ever assembled on the most deeply concealed and regretted deeds of the foremost men and women of the time. Each day Bart pored over them, committing them to memory. Each night he typed out the information he had carried back to the little house, within his head, on a mathematical symbols typewriter. In the history of the agency he became the only CIA employee who had ever seen this archive from AA to ZZZ. The Curator of Spider was always busy on Admin problems. No one else in the agency, including the Director of Central Intelligence, was allowed to see more than fractional parts of the files because the overall functioning policy of the agency was based upon the “need to know.” If the need to know wasn’t justified, no Spider information could be released.

  Bart accumulated and recorded in mathematical symbols information on terrorists, presidents, educators, actresses, generals, organized criminals, conglomerate operators, bankers, journalists, cardinals, pornographers, philanthropists, politicians and movers and shakers all across the board.

  On the eighty-seventh night of their work, Enid leaned across the table and rested her hands lightly on his on the typewriter keyboard. “I think you’ve found it,” she said. “This looks like it.”

  “Which?”

  “That last card.”

  He picked it up and studied it. “Why?”

  “Because he needs you. Maybe to these other people you’d just be a blackmailer and they’d find a way to get rid of you. But not this one. He is very greedy and you can make him richer and richer and richer.”

  “This fellow? He’s a hoodlum in narcotics.”

  “So?”

  “Ah! Aaaaaahhhh!”

  “Of course.”

  “It will take a lot of refining.”

  “You have the time.”

  “But you’re right. How did I miss him? We’ve found our angel. We have found the seven million bucks it takes to make an instant senator.”

  Enid hugged him from behind his chair. “And I think we’ve found the fifty million it takes to be nominated as president. Oh, Bart! Now how will you get to him?”

  “Love will find a way,” Bart said.

  “Get out the vice-president’s cards. Have him call this man for you.”

  “That would be using a shotgun on an ant.”

  “Then lay it out for that kinky senator in the K file. The one from Pennsylvania.”

  “That’s just right. I’ll call him tomorrow and explain the facts of life.”

  In January 1971, Bart was happy that the CIA phase of his life was almost over. In two more days, after his meeting with this leading criminal in New York, he would resign from the agency on medical grounds. He certainly wouldn’t have to lie about the trouble his leg was giving him. He was ready, and exhausted by pain, to move up and out into national politics. He and Enid had hated killing just as much as they hated heroin and blackmail, but sacrifices had to be made if one had purpose. And, as Enid said, the plain fact was that there would always be people who had to be killed by some control representing the common good because people like that just lived cross-ways. And what is dope? Enid had asked. Dope is alcohol, a narcotic in a different form. But no one had too much objection to alcohol, did they? When you came right down to it, alcohol and heroin were merely culture-cushions, weren’t they? Bart had to agree. He thought about it: “I will hold up my end of the bargain with the American people and do my best to serve them as well as every other statesman.”

  “I know you will, darling,” Enid said.

  18

  January 1971

  J.D. Palladino boarded the 9:15 Staten Island ferry and sat on the open rear deck so that he could look at the receding skyline when the boat got underway. Dom was carrying the suitcase that would record whatever the transmitter in the feather in the band of Mr. Palladino’s hat broadcast while he and this CIA man had their meeting.

  Dom and J.D. had not boarded the ferry together. They were too smart for that. But they had arrived in the same car. Bart watched them go into the ferry building separately. He followed them in with his stiff-legged walk, taking his time. When the ferry was well out into the harbor and Mr. Palladino was swiveling his head, becoming offended by the possibility that he had been stood up, Bart came up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder. Mr. Palladino wheeled in plac
e.

  “I am Hobart Simms,” Bart said. “Senator Karp spoke to you about me.”

  “All right,” Mr. Palladino said. He led the way to the aft bench that encircled the bulkhead facing Dom’s back thirty feet away at the boat’s rail. Mr. Palladino played the heavy hood to the hilt. “What can I do for you?”

  “You can begin by telling your man to bring over that tape recorder so I can dismantle it or you can’t do anything for me.”

  “What tape recorder?”

  Bart didn’t answer. He stared with his cold blue eyes, as expressionless as a leopard.

  “Dom! Bring the suitcase.”

  Dom was bewildered, but he did as he was told. Bart opened the case and removed the cassette.

  “What the hell is this?” Dom demanded in his tough, occupational way.

  “Go look at the buildings,” Mr. Palladino told him. Dom moved away.

  “All right!” Mr. Palladino snarled at Bart.

  “I am not saying that Turkish opium isn’t going to make a big comeback,” Bart said, “but it is going to be very expensive. What you are buying from Pierre Weill in Marseilles now is heroin made from the Turkish reserve, but the delivery is unreliable. The Bureau really have the French cased and the French hate to pay. So—in our mutual interest—I am here to offer you either a thousand kilos of raw opium or a hundred kilos of the purest but if you take the heroin you are crazy.”

  “What the fuck can I do wit’ raw opium?”

  “Take the opium and I will offer you a thousand-percent safe place to convert it to heroin so that, instead of paying twenty-seven thousand a keye to import it, you’ll be converting to heroin at a cost of six thousand a keye for the highest quality heroin—with guaranteed, one-hundred-percent safe delivery.”

  Mr. Palladino blinked.

  What Bart had said went into Mr. Palladino’s hat feather transmitter, then into a receiver-recorder in a cardboard carton which Dino had beside him on the continuous bench around the corner along the bulkhead, out of sight. Dino could see the receding skyline as well, but otherwise he was placed pretty good. Not like Dom.

  “If anybody can do that, why ain’t you doing it?” Mr. Palladino asked. “What is this—giving away heroin for six thousand a kilo?”

  Bart didn’t answer. He puffed on a foul pipe. Gulls cawked. Tugs tooted. Dino watched the Statue of Liberty.

  “Where do you get the opium?”

  “Asia.”

  “Where is this hundred-percent safe place to convert?”

  “Haiti.”

  “Who guarantees it?”

  “The President of Haiti.”

  “What would I need you for after I had a deal like that?”

  “You would take the best kind of care of me, Mr. Palladino, because I know you turned in the Sesteros. And I know you gave them Abramo Viseggi for the Comanti killing.”

  Mr. Palladino got to his feet immediately and rushed unsteadily to the ferry rail and vomited over the side. He leaned against the rail for a few minutes, then he went directly to the cardboard box on the bench at Dino’s side, picked it up and flung it into the Upper Bay. Weakly, he went back to the seat on the bench beside Bart.

  “You doubled up on tape machines?” Bart asked with admiration.

  Mr. Palladino nodded. “Let’s talk about your deal,” he said hoarsely. “How you gonna move it?”

  “The vice-president will call President Duvalier for an appointment for you. You will go to Haiti to set the deal with him and he will grab it. When you have it set I’ll go to Asia and set the opium shipments from Taiwan to Port au Prince.”

  “What is your end?”

  “In a minute. To sweeten Duvalier for you, Senator Karp is going to arrange for Education and Potable Water Loans for Haiti from the Inter-American Bank which will apply when he agrees to our plan.”

  “How do you know he’ll take the deal?”

  “Because he’s been cut off from foreign aid for seven years and we’re going to get it back for him.”

  “I can’t say anything until I know what your end is.”

  “I don’t want any split if that’s what you’re worrying about. I want to be elected United States Senator from Maryland. That takes a lot of money but still not the kind of money that would even dent the kind of deal I am handing you.”

  “How much?”

  “Out of this deal—and I have only told you part of it, I have other, bigger angles—I want seven million five hundred thousand dollars to be paid directly into my campaign in a way I’ll lay out when the time comes. Then, every year for the next four years you pay seven million five directly into another campaign fund in the same way.”

  “What other campaign fund?”

  “From the day I make it into the Senate, I’ll be running for President. When I run, I’ll need more money because a lot of money has to be spread around. But you’ll never miss it. And you’ll have a friend in the White House.”

  Mr. Palladino felt an enormous surge of pride. If his father had ever thought that his own son would be in a position like this he would have kissed his feet. His father! A man who thought a big political contact was like Frank Costello, fahcrissake! He couldn’t believe what was happening. He would be J.D. Palladino: kingmaker! A kingmaker! He took a pale lavender silk handkerchief out of his breast pocket and laid it over his face. He leaned back on the bench and tried to think.

  Bart puffed on the foul pipe. Dino watched the seagulls and New Jersey. Bart turned down a shoeshine man’s offer silently, shaking his head. Mr. Palladino whipped the handkerchief off his face and sat up straight.

  “Fill me in about this president in Haiti,” he said huskily.

  “Do you know Haiti?”

  “Well—”

  “You know where Cuba is?”

  “Well, yeah. I been there. It’s near Havana, right?”

  “Cuba is ninety miles away from Florida. Haiti is about six hundred miles east of Havana, sixty miles off the far end of Cuba. The fake reason you will be going to Haiti is to lease the casino. I have a gimmick to bring in tourists. A lot of tourists means a country is stable. When it’s stable, that means we can restore foreign aid because then Haiti will be a bulwark against Communism.”

  “I think I am getting you,” Mr. Palladino said. “A little bit. Maybe.”

  “When you get home, pick up a pencil and figure out how much money there is in the manufacture of uppers, downers and acid, then figure out how much the legitimate pharmaceutical houses are ripping you off when they leave you just the wholesale end. When you get the heroin plants operating smoothly, then you’ll set up your own plants in Haiti to make uppers, downers, speed and acid. And mandrax and STP and mescaline and Phencycladine.”

  “What’s that? We never handled that.”

  “It’s going to be very big. It causes frightening hallucinations in humans. It makes them feel extremely tiny, as if they could hide in keyholes or matchboxes. It gives them a sense of already being dead.”

  “Jesus, that will be a real seller,” Mr. Palladino exclaimed.

  19

  January–February 1971

  Mr. Palladino’s greed overcame his fear. He sat in motionless fright after Bart left him, thinking about one man walking around with information about the Sesteros and Abramo in his head. Mr. Palladino didn’t want to think about anything until he had figured out how to handle this peril. The smartest thing, he knew, would be to have the little prick hit. But he couldn’t bring himself to have that done because the man was going to get him so much money. Worse, the man wasn’t interested in money. He was really tilted on that one thing: politics. He must be crazy. This man wasn’t really interested in nailing J.D. Palladino. He didn’t really give a shit about the Sesteros or Abramo. But who could be sure? Who wanted to make a billion dollars with this son-of-a-bitch standing behind the door with a raised pickaxe? All right, maybe he couldn’t bring himself to like the situation entirely, but with the kind of money involved like it was involved he
re, he could get himself to forget it. If he could only figure out how to get a lock on the man, then everything would be all right. If he could get something on him as big as what the man had on him then it would be an Indian stand-off. He could do it. That was his specialty: planning. They were going to meet again that night on the Staten Island ferry and the man was going to fill him in on what to say in Haiti. So he would have him followed when the man got off the ferry and maybe find out something useful. Mr. Palladino didn’t know what he wanted to find out but he knew he would know it when he saw it. And he knew he had to get a lock on this man or go back to living the way he had lived for fourteen months after he had betrayed the Sesteros, while he waited for their people to find out who had done it.

  Eight days later Mr. Palladino’s Jet Star with its six Pratt & Whitney JT12A-6A turbojet engines and a 2,000-mile range took off for Haiti. When they were airborne, Mr. Palladino dictated letters to Angela. Dom and Dino played gin. Eight days had been enough to find out a little about Hobart Willmott Simms. Palladino was beginning to think he would be able to throw a lock on this man. The Haitian deal was clear, the Indian stand-off was getting clearer.

  When they touched down at the President François Duvalier International Airport at Port au Prince, there was a big crowd waiting, so Mr. Palladino sent Dom to find out what it was all about while he continued to dictate to Angela. Dom opened the door and stopped short on the ramp. A black colonel of the Haitian Army in full dress uniform was starting to come up the ramp.

  “You,” Dom said. “Off.”