The Whisper of the Axe Read online

  Uncle Herbert’s influence and Bart’s record brought in the assignment Bart and Enid had dreamed about—the top management job at Air Opium. They were transferred to northern Thailand. They had a lovely house that had been built by the agency. The second night they were there, as they sat on the screened verandah and blew grass, Enid told him about Spider.

  Spider, Enid said, was a colossal, computerized, personalized library maintained at Langley of viciously vital information on every leading man and woman in the world. “I mean—every fact every one of these people has broken his back to hide forever—well, those facts are in Spider, Bart. And the fact is, these Spider files are going to make your fame and fortune.”

  “How?”

  “You’ll come up with the answers. All I thought was that when we finish our tour here, if Uncle Herbert could get you transferred in as Assistant Curator at Spider, and if you could really start training your memory while we’re out here, you could bring home a part of the Spider files in your head every night. We could work up some kind of code to store them, so that when the time comes for you to make your move to get big campaign financing to put you in the Senate, you are going to know exactly who the moneybags is that you are going to slam it to to make him sign those checks to pay for your campaign.”

  “Slam it to whom?”

  “Whomever you pick out of the Spider files. Whoever is the most vulnerable, honey, if you know what I mean.”

  “Dynamite. Really dynamite.”

  “It sure is.”

  “Let me think about it.”

  “You’re the brain.”

  Totally certain that Enid had solved the problem of the gigantic costs of running for public office, Bart laid out the work program he must follow during his off hours away from airline management tasks. He settled down into intensive memory training, working with Enid for five hours every night he could be home. They worked with English language newspapers and short-wave radio broadcasts. They used columns of drone from The Congressional Record because Enid felt that memorizing anything interesting after memorizing the Record would seem like the easiest thing in the world.

  During his two years of training and two years in the field, Bart and Enid had never asked for any leave so, when they knew this memory thing was going to work, they applied for three weeks of R&R in Europe. The request was granted. They slurped up Paris restaurants, then they rented a car and set out for the champagne country so they could motor on to Strasbourg, then cross into Germany, then to Dusseldorf where Bart paid a mathematics professor the DM equivalent of $8,000 to develop a mathematical code. It was the only kind of code that could protect him from agency surveillance. Having used astronomy as his cover from the beginning, Bart had spent a considerable amount of time with mathematics and the agency’s staff surveillance people no longer paid any attention to the sheaves of mathematical notes Bart left lying around. Mathematical codes held so many possibilities for permutation that even a bank of on-line computers used by the best cryptanalysts in the world couldn’t break down such a code in hundreds of years. Bart had come to feel a great deal of respect for the tiny German mathematics professor whom he had known during the two years of his European assignment, but the man simply had to be liquidated with most extreme prejudice because he was the only other person who held the code’s keys. Enid had to agree with Bart’s decision and felt just as sad as he did about it.

  While he treated mnemonics as a hobby by night, Bart pursued the agency’s work just as thoroughly during the day. He really ran that airline, jacking up its net profit by 12.079 percent. He viewed opium as another payload just as if he were engaged in flying shoes out of Endicott, New York.

  Bart’s excellence was a tradition of the service. Although the higher military grades of the MACV and the South Vietnamese forces were heavily involved in the narcotics traffic out of the Golden Triangle of Laos, Thailand and Burma, the CIA’s severe exception to personal corruption among its officers kept most of them from being stained. There was the occasional rotten apple, but by and large CIA management personnel observed a strict code against profiting personally from the narcotics trade. Not that Bart ever questioned things like that. He was so irreproachably stainless himself that he simply assumed that anyone else privileged to serve The Agency in Asia or anywhere else was just goshdarned lucky.

  13

  Spring 1969

  When Teel got it all figured out about how to spread the pure and how to launder the money so she could drop it into the accounts of the several hundred companies she had spent so much time forming, she telephoned New York’s leading black wholesaler of shit, an evil, expressionless dark brown man named William Buffalo, and asked him to please call at her office.

  Buffalo was a hard man who had made it to the top of the metropolitan narcotics trade without too much strain. He had been cut up and shot, but nothing permanent. He had known Teel since back on 124th Street when he had been a dealer ambitious to expand. Teel had won him the street again on a murder charge three years before. He believed in Teel just as everyone did who had ever talked to her. His bodyguards waited in the outer office and kidded around with Teel’s banana-skinned secretary who wore a turtleneck sweater with the word PEACHES sewn across it. Buffalo went into Teel’s office, taking his hat off, and sitting down while he smiled his terrible smile, unable to do anything about his eyes which might have seen too many people in bad trouble. Teel grinned at him.

  “How’s it, William B.?”

  “I’m winnin’.”

  “I don’t want anything. I’m gone give to you.”

  “What you givin’ today?”

  “Would you believe fifty kilos of the pure, purer, purest?”

  “FIFTY? Jesus Christ, Miss Teel. Did you say fifty?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I been around all my life. I never saw fifty. I never saw more’n seven.”

  “Can you move it?”

  “Shit, yes. At what price?”

  “I want this load to go at five percent under the street price.”

  “You mean the import price or the wholesale price?”

  “You tell me.”

  “Is it cut? Will you take the first cut? Thassa difference between import and wholesale.”

  “No cut, Will. Total pure. The highest.”

  “Then why knock off five percent?”

  “I’ll talk about that. How much can you handle?”

  “All you can shovel at me.”

  “For cash money?”

  “I think so.”

  “How about a hundred keyes?”

  “Nobody, not even the Rockefeller boys, can shake up the cash for a hunnert keyes. If it wasn’t you sayin’ it, I wouldn’t even believe there was a hunnert keyes of H all in one place.”

  “I want the five percent off to start a price war and make more users,” Teel said. “I want you to case the country where the Sicilians control it and where the brothers are working. Then I want you to pick out the black wholesalers and dealers you can trust and pass along the five percent to them. And if it turns out all of a sudden you can’t trust them, I want them killed the day you find out.”

  “I dig. A little bit. But mostly I ask you—why?”

  “In a little while I want to stop the black wholesalers and dealers from buying from the Sicilians.”

  Buffalo whistled.

  “Then,” Teel went on, “when you got your deals set with the pure going out and the cash coming back on maybe two hundred keyes a month, then I’ll run it and you and I will work out the split.”

  “All right. But what about the Sicilians?”

  Teel smiled broadly. “Well, they got to go sooner or later anyhow, don’t they?”

  He grinned back at her. “That’s the truth.”

  “Suppose we go to a man like Grunts Patterson in South Chicago and we offer him five points under the Sicilian price. Then what?”

  “He take it.”

  “Okay. When he takes it you k
now how to tell the rest of the people in Chicago they can have the same deal. Then what?”

  “Well—a little time passes, right?”

  Teel nodded.

  “Then the Sicilians go to war.”

  “And if we back up our customers, city for city, with more muscle than they could ever get together themselves, and we blow the Sicilians right into the lake—then we own Chicago. Right?”

  “Thass right.”

  “That’s what I want and that’s what I’ll give.”

  “And I’m the middleman on all this?”

  “If it ain’t too rich, William.”

  “When do we start?”

  “We start this summer but we start slow. We won’t really hit them till seventy.”

  14

  December 1970

  Teel told Frank O’Connell, the head of her law firm, that she was going to need a closing pretty fast. He set her with a large housing development and shopping mall in northern Virginia. Her fees for the closing came to $891,000. When she had the cash in hand she called Buffalo, who remained in awe of her as he probably was of no one else alive. “How are we on prison information?” Teel asked.

  “What kind?”

  “I want six men and five women who have done time for armed robbery. Can you do it?”

  “Shit, yes.”

  “But it’s got a little twist. I need those same people who did the time for armed robbery to have Army or Marine Corps combat experience.”

  “Well, sure—the men. But not the women.”

  “Just get me women who were in the Army or the Marines. Okay? That plus about five years in the women’s wing of some state pen will toughen them up just about right. But they all got to have a military background and an armed robbery on their sheet.”

  “I’ll go right on it.”

  “When you get them, I want you to talk to them for me, one at a time.”

  “Is this all about the pure we got comin’ in?”

  “Indirectly.”

  Buffalo’s top man was a crazy, coffee-colored bookkeeper who could make those ledgers tell the tax creeps anything Buffalo wanted to pay. His name was Dawes and Buffalo knew he was crazy because Dawes was an anarchist. Dawes was actually in the heroin business not for any large score but because he wanted to waste society as fast as it could be flaked away. “They is too many people,” he told Buffalo, “and they is fuckin’ each other up.”

  Dawes was crazy but he was smart. He gave out good advice. He’d been working for Buffalo for eleven years, on the down ramps and on the upswings, and Buffalo knew that little Binchy Dawes had a head on his shoulders. So, when Buffalo wanted to think out loud, he thought out loud all over Binchy. Binchy was how William Buffalo pronounced the nickname for Benjamin. Dawes’s full name was Benjamin Disraeli Dawes.

  “You know my big connection, Binchy?”

  “I know you got it.”

  “You know what she ask me today?”

  “Whut she ast you?”

  “She ask me can I find her six dudes and five foxes who done time for armed robbery one.”

  “No kiddin’?”

  “The fact.”

  “Then she got to be a woman to go with. She got to be an anarchist.”

  “She the most. You know what she want them folks for?”

  “What for?”

  “She want the men to join the army.”

  “Join the army? With a war on?” Binchy chuckled. “I got a son in the army, Bill. He a real anarchist. No shit. Went all the way thoo West Point. Number six in his class. He a lieutenant now. Someday he gone be in a real position to fuck up that army for good. What she want them to join the army for?”

  “She doin’ something big. A fox like that don’t collect no eleven robbers to work unless it somethin’ very, very big. She gone pay out twenty-fi’ grand to ever one a them—thass three hunnert thou, Binchy—she think big.”

  Dawes became very serious. “You got to get my boy in on that, Buffie. We don’t care about the twenny-fi’ gee. My boy is a trained officer of the Army of the United States, an Academy man, an’ there ain’t nothin’ any armed robber can do my boy cain’t do—besides he an officer. She see that inna minute when you tell her. I mean—ever’body know that one devout anarchist worth two bank robbers no matter what.”

  Binchy Dawes flew to Washington early the next morning. He rented a car and drove out to Fort Sissons. He sent in word that Lieutenant Orin Dawes’s father had come up from New York to see him on urgent family business. After a twenty-five-minute wait Orin came out. He was a fine-looking boy; brown with caramel eyes like his mother. He had a smart look, like an interesting man, just the way he had always been an interesting little boy. And—Jesus!—he sure looked great in that uniform.

  “Let’s take a little spin,” Binchy said. “I won’t take much time.” They got into the rented Plymouth and drove along at an easy pace. The son waited for his father to talk.

  “Well—it come just like I always said it would,” Binchy said. “The big chance has come. We can strike the blow.”

  “The blow?”

  “The chance is here to git to the place where we can bust the government and the army by doing what we know the best to do.”

  “What happened, Pa?”

  “Something big. Eleven of the messiest cats you ever saw are gonna enlist under orders from the top.”

  “What top?”

  “We don’t need to know that, Orin. After they in, they report back to my boss. Then they take over and turn the whole fuckin’ army upside-down and I got an okay from William Buffalo to have you lead that buncha weirdoes.”

  “That’s pretty hazy, Pa.” He looked glum.

  “It’s gotta be hazy! What kinda anarchist outfit would we be runnin’ if ever’ man with a job to do knew the whole thing, step by step of the way? You jes’ let us do the thinkin’, Orin. You get the action part.”

  “I don’t know, Pa.”

  “Whatta you mean, you don’t know?”

  “It’s just that—well, I got picked over everybody else for a big Army assignment, Pa.”

  “What assignment?”

  “I can’t talk about it.”

  “You don’ need to talk about it. You can forget it. After a lifetime of plannin’ and trainin’ since you Momma died, we right at the brink, baby. Everything we been plannin’ for.”

  “Okay, Pa. What do I do?”

  “You just stay right here till we can get you transferred out. If they move you, jes’ tell me where. That’s all you got to do, Orin.”

  “Okay, Pa.”

  “We ain’t never gone look back, son. This the biggest.”

  It took eleven days for Buffalo to line up the convicts. Teel accepted Lieutenant Dawes. She listened to Buffalo read off the prison records, then she said, “Somebody who goes in for armed robbery is only reckless in a certain way. He is an achiever. He doesn’t care what could happen to him in his work because he knows he’s going to win—or forget it. That’s his whole thing, William. He is an artist so he hates authority. He hates the rules. He grabs at being the most dangerous kind of piece man there is. But, at the same time, he doesn’t want to lose. He wants to go on defying everybody and he can’t do that inside any prison. So mostly he’s smart. He is the very prime of the primest. Okay. The instructions are in the money envelopes. You can read them. All they got to do is agree to join the U.S. Army and we take care of the rest, like the governors’ pardons and that kinda jazz. As soon as they get stationed somewhere you tell them to tell you where they are. Then you tell me and we get it all on the road. But that ain’t all, William. For every day over ninety days they are still in that army, every one of those cats is gonna get a thousand a day from you. Okay?”

  “Well, sure. Okay. I was just wonderin’ ’bout me. You think it’s good for the business if one a them cats should—uh—like crack open and talk, maybe say it was me recruited them for the Army?”

  “Buffie, no way. Not a way for
anybody to tell one of them dudes from five hundred other thousand grunts.”

  She got home at three o’clock in the afternoon to make her brother Jonas one of the last of the high French meals he was going to have for a long, long time—and he was a boy who liked to eat.

  She was going to start him off with a salad of Louisiana crawfish tails with Beluga caviar on top of a lemony mayonnaise with heavy cream folded into it. Then would come sea bass in puff pastry, then some roast woodcock on croutons followed by fat duck’s liver in a truffle salad.

  She would let him rest a little then, maybe drink a little mineral water to be ready to eat some more, but with Jonas that was one issue which was never in doubt. A lot of the most of the rest of the world was in doubt for Jonas. She couldn’t figure how the two of them could have been raised in the same very special way, in their very special isolation from the slings and arrows, and have it turn out with her being so sure and he being so unsure. After they had had their farewell talk—Jonas was the one human it was so hard for Teel to say farewell to—she would stoke him up again with a green salad, some prime ribs, then grilled lobster and a crawfish “bush” with all those bitter-tasting veins removed. But she decided she couldn’t do that. Instead she soaked the little shellfish in a milk bath for two hours. They didn’t like the taste of the milk. They wiggled around and purged themselves of all the bitterness without losing any of the taste. She would finish him off with a mousseline of apples and walnuts, polishing its perfection with noyau liqueur, the French almond liqueur known as Noyau de Poissy. If he was still hungry after all of that, she’d crown him with a pot.

  They talked all through the meal, not just at the break between. Jonas was about the handsomest black man she had ever seen and that was more beautiful than any man has a right to be. He was as black as she was but twice her size; a huge gentle man with quizzical eyes. In a way he was her little boy.