Doug Allyn - v108 n03-04_1996-09-10

He reached back into his memory again. “Zai-jan,” he said. “Goodbye.”

© 1996 by George C. Chesbro

George Chesbro’s best-known creation is the dwarf private eye Mongo, a character whose adventures are larger than life and evoke, as William L. DeAndrea said in Encyclopedia Mysteriosa, the era of the pulps. Similarly larger than life, with an almost supernatural ability to intuit things, is ex C.I.A. op Veil, a character Mr. Chesbro gives the starring role in the following story.

Veil dreams.

Vivid dreaming is his gift and affliction, the lash of memory and a guide to justice, a mystery and sometimes the key to mystery, prod to violence and maker of peace, an invitation to madness and the fountainhead of his power as an artist.

The Lazarus Person standing under the streetlight on the sidewalk outside the former warehouse Veil Kendry owned was an attractive woman in her late thirties or early forties. From the vast loft on the fourth floor where he painted and lived, Veil watched her through the one-way glass of his window. Although her face was impassive and her expression distant, he sensed her discomfort. Despite the fact that this was New York City’s East Village, the woman was not in danger, for Veil had taken steps when he had first bought the building fifteen years before to make sure that the few blocks surrounding his building were crime-free; drug dealers and others who committed violent crimes in his immediate neighborhood invariably chose not to return a second time, and some disappeared altogether. There was no bus stop in the middle of the block, no apparent reason for her to be standing there for almost forty-five minutes, and the fact that she was a Lazarus Person made him doubly suspicious. If she somehow knew about him and wanted to talk, she had only to press the buzzer at the entrance on the ground floor.

When an hour had passed and the woman still had not moved, Veil went to the telephone and called Dr. Sharon Solow at home. She was not there, and her answering machine did not come on. When there was no answer at her office in the Sleep Research Laboratories at St. Vincent Hospital, he went down to his arsenal of weapons and equipment on the third floor. He took a pair of night-vision binoculars off a shelf, turned off the lights, and went to a window at the front. First he scanned the rooftops of the buildings across the street, but saw no one there. In the darkened doorway of a storefront directly across the way, however, he spotted a man standing by himself, and he was wearing headphones. Veil peered into the night on the other three sides of the building, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Satisfied that the watcher and listener in the doorway was alone, Veil left the building through a freight-delivery entrance at the rear, went to the end of the block, around the building, and crossed the street, then came up on the man as silently as a shadow within the shadows and hit him in the solar plexus. As the man doubled over and gasped for air, Veil grabbed the back of his coat collar and marched him across the street. The woman now looked sad, and she remained motionless, watching him as he approached.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said quietly as Veil dragged the man up over the curb and shoved him toward the entrance to his building. “The man in green said he would—”

“You don’t have to explain,” Veil interrupted. “I know you meant me no harm, and I know you didn’t agree to act as a lure out of concern for your personal safety. I promise you they won’t threaten your family again. You’re free to go. There’s a subway station a few blocks north of here, and you’ll be safe walking there.”

The woman nodded, then turned and disappeared into the night. Veil pulled the man through the doorway into his building, then shoved him hard against the doors of the freight elevator in the small foyer. He closed the entrance door behind him, then turned to the man, who had slumped to the floor and was still holding his stomach. The expression on his face was a mixture of fear and wonder. He had fiery red hair, green eyes, and thick fields of freckles on his cheeks and forehead. Veil estimated him to be in his mid twenties, although he could have passed as a teenager — a potentially dangerous teenager who, for some reason, was prying into some very dangerous secrets.

“My God!” the young man said excitedly, shaking his head and licking his lips. “It’s true! You recognized what she was! The two of you must be able to com—!”

“Stop jabbering, or I’ll smack you again,” Veil said curtly. “Who the hell are you?”

The young man with the red hair and green eyes swallowed hard, then removed his headphones, which hung askew around his neck. A single droplet of sweat had appeared in the center of his forehead. “I... won’t tell you anything. You can’t make me.”

Veil grunted. “Really? You look awfully young to be working in the field for the CIA, but when you reach middle age just about everybody starts looking young.”

“I said I wouldn’t—” The young man stopped speaking and cried out as Veil abruptly grabbed the lapels of his overcoat and yanked him to his feet, once again slamming him against the slatted elevator doors. “Are you going to torture me?”

“Nah,” Veil replied evenly. “I hate torture. I don’t mind torturing torturers, but you don’t look like one of those. But I will show you a trick your chiropractor probably doesn’t even know.”

Veil jerked the other man around and cupped his chin with his left hand. He twisted the man’s neck at the same time as he pressed hard with the heel of his right hand against a precise point on the man’s spine. There were sharp popping sounds in the man’s neck and back, and he collapsed to the floor.

The man in the overcoat sat on the floor with his legs splayed and his weight balanced on his hands as he stared up into the glacial blue eyes of the rangy man with the shoulder-length, gray-streaked yellow hair who stood over him. What he saw there was death, or worse. He glanced down and began to cry when he saw the puddle of urine forming between his legs. “I’m peeing myself and I can’t even feel it,” he sobbed. “You’ve paralyzed me.”

“Incontinence is the least of your worries, sonny. Right now you’re at least a candidate for a wheelchair. If you don’t give simple, straight answers to my questions, you’re going to end up being wheeled around on a hospital gurney for the rest of your life. As you may have noticed, I don’t bluff, and I rarely even bother to threaten. Now, if you don’t want me to shut the rest of you down, stop slobbering and tell me your name.”

The young man cut off a sob, breathed, “Denny Whalen.”

“All right, Denny Whalen, you work for the CIA, of course. Ops?”

“Yes and no.”

“Give me the no part first.”

“We don’t do... nasty stuff. No covert operations. We’re organized under Operations, but we’re strictly research.”

“What’s your outfit called?”

“Department of Human Possibilities.”

“I make it my business to keep up with these things, and I’ve never heard of you. You need another spinal adjustment?”

“We used to be called the Bureau of Unusual Human Resources.”

“Ah yes,” Veil said, and sighed. “BUHR. The ‘chill shop.’ I thought the dwarf put you people out of business last year.”

“We’ve been... reorganized.”

“Right. Just what the world needs now: a reorganized ‘chill shop.’ If you’re not a field operative, what were you doing with eavesdropping equipment outside my building tonight?”