Herbert Burkholz - Brain Damage

Delaney conceded the point with a shrug. "What about the other assignments?"

"Sound off," Sammy ordered. "Ben first."

"June was his first real love, maybe his only love," I said. "What would he do if he heard that she was suddenly a widow, available and vulnerable? I think he'd come running."

Snake leaned forward, and said intently, "Mike Teague was like family to Hassan. What would he do if the old man got burned out of his home? To tell you the truth, I don't know. But I'm sure he'd make some kind of a move, and he might have come here to make it."

"All right, I'll buy it so far," said Delaney. "But a basketball team?"

"They were the pride of his youth," Vince explained. "If you don't dig sports, then you won't understand it, but if Van Buren had made the tournament, I think there's a good chance that he would have tried to be here for it."

"Maybe a single button would have done it, maybe not," I said. "But Ogden wasn't taking any chances. He pushed them all at the same time."

"And it almost worked." Jessup shook his head sadly. "It was a masterpiece, a typical Ogden operation. Safeer hears that his daughter has been brutally attacked. He hears that the woman he loves is free to marry. He hears that his old friend Teague has been burned out of his home. He hears that his college team is going to the tournament. Damn, it's a psychological blitzkrieg, he can't resist it."

"He would have come over," said Delaney. "I'm sure of it."

"Damn it, if we had only known. We killed a beautiful operation."

"You mean, you would have let it happen?" asked Martha. "The rape, the murder, and all the rest of it?"

Jessup looked uncomfortable. "It's hard to say… I mean, if we could have gotten our hands on Safeer…" His voice trailed off.

"Talk about brain damage," Snake crowed. "Just look at him, he's ready to kick himself. He would have done it, all right."

Jessup said stiffly. "That's academic now. You stopped them. You stopped them cold."

"You sure did," said Delaney. "Four out of four."

Sammy said quietly, "Four out of five."

They stared at him, and there was silence in the room. So they had missed it. The five of us had caught it, but the two normals had missed it. It had nothing to do with being a sensitive. It was there, right in front of them, but they missed it.

"Five?" said Jessup. "You said five?"

"The singer," said Sammy. "Maria-Teresa Bonfiglia."

"What about her?" He still didn't see it.

"Mrs. Simms sends clippings about her to Hassan."

"So what?" said Delaney; "So the bastard likes opera." He didn't see it, either.

"You remember Ogden's lockbox?" Sammy said patiently. "The right-hand side contained envelopes, one for each of five women. They were Sarah Brine, the actress; Jenny Cookson, the anchorwoman; Carla MacAlester, the senator's wife; Vivian Livingstone, the socialite; and Maria-Teresa Bonfiglia, the soprano."

"My God," said Jessup. "Could it be a coincidence?"

"I don't think so. In the left-hand side of the box were the assignments to Ogden's four agents. I made the assumption, I guess we all made the assumption, that the right side was for personal use and the left side was for business, but we were wrong. The envelope for Bonfiglia was different from those of the other women. Students?"

"No erotic photos," said Vince.

"No love letters," said Martha.

"Correct, just the contract for the farewell tour. Ogden never had a romantic relationship with her. He arranged for the tour, he underwrote the expenses, but he wasn't paying off a sexual debt the way he did with the others. He knew that Safeer would hear about the tour. He was pushing one more button."

"How?" asked Jessup. "What has Bonfiglia got to do with Safeer?"

"I don't know," Sammy confessed. "But Ogden obviously did, and he used it to set one last piece of bait."

"The fifth button. Her final performance is next Thursday at Carnegie Hall. Are you saying that Safeer will be there?"

"David Ogden knew his man. If he knew him as well as I think he did, then yes, I think he'll be there. Sorry, folks, but that's the way I see it. It isn't over yet."

IT should have been over for us, but it wasn't. We had done our jobs, and the rest of it should have been left to the proper agencies. If Hassan Rashid, aka Safeer, was really going to risk his neck by coming into the country to attend the farewell performance of an overage opera singer at Carnegie Hall, then the job now belonged to Immigration, the FBI, and the NYPD in that order. I say "if'” he was coming because I wasn't anywhere near as confident as Sammy was that he would show. I agreed with Sammy that Ogden 's operation had been brilliantly conceived. (That it also had been unblushingly evil was something else again.) But to me the brilliance had resided in the timing of the events, the sequential pushing of all the buttons, and not in any single one of them. Taken all together, they would have created what Sammy had called a psychological blitzkrieg, but I had my doubts that any one of them alone, save perhaps the attack on Lila, would have been enough to do the trick. So I wasn't at all comfortable about this night at the opera, and I would have been more than happy to bow out of the job at that point, but we were stuck with it for one simple reason. Nobody knew what Safeer looked like. Plastic surgery had changed his face and his fingerprints entirely, and careful schooling had done the same for his voice, his speech patterns, and his accent. We had to assume that with the manufactured papers available to him, he would have no trouble clearing Immigration into the country, and that he would be virtually unidentifiable once he was here. If his purpose had been simply to enter the country, there was no way in which we could have stopped him, but he had a theoretical goal, and that made it possible. I say theoretical because I still did not fully believe that he was coming, but the assumption was that he was headed for Carnegie Hall, and that's where we came in. Only a sensitive had the ability to spot him in a crowd and set him up for the suits, and so we still were on the job.

In addition to these doubts, I was unhappy about the situation for a number of reasons, the most important of which was that I had just killed a man. Madrigal had been right in what he had said just before I pulled the trigger. We may not be quite the ladies and gents of the intelligence world that he thought we were, but we do like to think of ourselves as being something different. No one knows better than a sensitive how filthy and corrupting the life in that world can be, and we try to insulate ourselves from the worst parts of it. The title defines the attitude. We are sensitives, with an inbred sensibility to the cares and the woes of humankind. What else could we be, being privy to the hopes and despairs of everyone around us? We work with our brains, not our backs, and we leave the mechanics of the game, the sweat, the grime, and the inevitable violence to others. But there comes a time, as it had come to me, and it had not come easily. I had taken a life, and that was no small thing to me. I had taken it to save myself, and to save Calvin, but that did not help my sleep at night.

Another intruder in the night was June. No, not romance. I carried a gleaming memory of her alabaster body wrapped in a cheap motel towel, but it was a memory to be filed under lost chances. When I thought of her in the night it was with sadness, not passion. Sadness for both of them, actually. Calvin and June, who should never have married, and who now were bound together only by two small sacks of marital cement. A not uncommon situation these days, but a personal one to me for I had intervened in it. I had pointed a finger, playing God, and had said that this one shall live and this one shall die. By killing Madrigal I had kept her pitiful marriage alive, and now I was being asked to point that finger again and help to destroy the man she thought she should have married. Mutt and Jeff, and the Pom-Pom Queen, and what would have happened to Hassan Rashid if he, not Calvin, had won the woman? Do we still speak of winning women? We certainly speak of losing them, and Hassan had lost. What would he have been with June at his side? Not Safeer, I was sure of that, but what? And what did it matter to me? Another intruder that clashed with my sleep.