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Ross Thomas: Ah, Treachery!

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Ross Thomas Ah, Treachery!

Ah, Treachery!: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

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Cashiered U.S. Army major Edd “Twodees” Partain is working as a clerk in Wanda Lou’s Weaponry in Sheridan, Wyoming. That is, he works there until the tall man in the lamb’s wool topcoat walks into the shop and announces that a certain secret operation that took place in El Salvador is about to hit the media fan. For Partain, the visit from the man in gray leads to an unforeseen career move. Flying to L.A., the ex-major is grilled by a woman hiding out — in a $2000-a-day hospital room — from the “Little Rock folks.” Millicent Altford is a rainmaker, and a good one. adept at shaking the money tree for deserving politicos. Her secret war chest is missing $1.2 million, and she wants Partain to ride shotgun while she gets it back. And that leads Partain across the continent to Washington, where the blunders of U.S. covert action in Central America are at last percolating up through the political ranks. A storefront organization called VOMIT — Victims of Military Intelligence Treachery — is trying to defend a network of former intelligence operatives, soldiers, and covert warriors, including Partain himself, from a plot to keep the truth buried. VOMIT has its hands full. Because Twodees Partain is making even more enemies than he used to, a number of bags containing $1.2 million are floating around, and some old El Salvador hands are stirring up the ashes of political sin — with corpses sprawling from Georgetown to Beverly Hills...

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“Then came Mr. Altford, right?” Partain said.

She nodded and had another sip of wine.

“Who was he?”

“Slime.”

“Any particular kind?”

“The all-purpose kind. Lawrence Demming Altford is sexy, smart and very rich. He’s also a dedicated liar, a louse and a top-seeded paranoid. It lasted three years until Millie gave up and divorced him. But when she didn’t ask for a property settlement or alimony, he sicced private detectives on her to find out what she was really up to.”

“Why’d she keep his name?”

Jessica Carver shrugged. “Tired of changing it, I suppose. Or maybe she thought ‘Millicent Altford’ sounds kind of tony.” She had another sip of the wine and asked, “What’d you say your name was?”

“I didn’t. But it’s Edd Partain.”

“Spell it.”

“Edd-with-two-ds P-a-r-t-a-i-n.”

“What if I called Millie and asked if she’s ever heard of any Edd-with-two-ds Partain?”

“I think you’d better.”

She put her wine down, picked up a phone that was beneath the bar, tapped out 411, asked for the hospital’s number, called it and requested Millicent Altford’s room. After someone answered, she asked, “Ever hear of an Edd Partain, Ma?”

She listened for twenty seconds or so, staring at Partain as if he were some recent purchase she might return. “Well, this one’s forty or forty-one, about six-two, maybe 175 pounds and wears an old blue suit, white shirt, striped red and blue tie that’s way too narrow and honest-to-God black lace-ups.”

She listened again, then said, “The hair’s real dark with little gray streaks in it. The eyes are a funny-strange gray-green. Real white teeth. An okay chin, but it’s only a chin. And he’s quick, the way a cat’s quick.”

She again listened for several moments, looked at Partain and said in accented Spanish, “My mother wishes to know if you’re willing to share the apartment, if not your bed, with her daughter?”

Partain replied in Spanish. “Any arrangement pleasing to her is pleasing to me.”

“He’ll go either way, Millie,” Jessica Carver said, then listened some more and replied, “Christ, I don’t know. Until I find work — like always.” There were a few more seconds of listening before she said, “Right,” broke the connection and put the phone away.

To Partain she said, “Can you cook?”

“Sure. Can you?”

“No. So first I’ll show you your room, then you can show me your scrambled eggs.”

The apartment had three bedrooms — one master and two regulars. Partain said the regular one facing Wilshire was fine. Because there was really nothing to unpack, he put the old overnight bag on the bed and told Jessica Carver her scrambled eggs would be ready in twenty-five or thirty minutes.

“Why so long?”

“You want biscuits, don’t you?” Partain said.


Partain served it all at the same time — the scrambled eggs, the hot Bisquick biscuits, the double-thick, extra-lean bacon, and the sliced tomatoes that had come with little gold stickers boasting that they were organically grown.

They ate in a kitchen that, while not large, had virtually every appliance a small fancy restaurant would need. They ate at an old wooden table, a veteran of at least 25,000 breakfasts with the stains, scars and chipped yellow paint to prove it. They ate mostly in silence until Jessica Carver picked up her last slice of bacon, the one she may have been saving for dessert, ate it and said, “Millie grew up eating breakfast at this table, and when she was sixteen or seventeen decided she was going to eat breakfast at it for the rest of her life. My ma can be a little weird.”

“She was born in Bonham, right?”

“She told you that?”

“No.”

“Then how’d you know?”

“The same way I’d be willing to bet she moved to Dallas when she was eight or nine.”

“Yeah, well, you could’ve guessed that from what I said about Harry and his Stinson.”

“I’m just good at American accents,” Partain said. “Your mother’s comes and goes now, but it’s pretty. If you go farther east along the Red River, they all start sounding like Perot.”

“Which can cause nerve damage.” Carver examined him curiously for several moments, then asked, “You travel a lot? Is that why you study accents?”

“I was in the Army a long time and it became a hobby.”

“How long?”

“Nineteen years.”

“What were you when you left?”

“A major.”

“West Point? OCS? National Guard? ROTC?”

Partain shook his head. “I was in a long-range recon outfit in Vietnam that got wiped out except for me and two other guys — both short-timers. The Army panicked and thought it was in desperate need of an experienced second lieutenant to rebuild the platoon — except there weren’t any experienced second lieutenants. There never are. So they made me one overnight.”

“Where’d you learn your pretty Spanish?”

“From my mother. Where’d you learn your Mexican?”

“Mostly from a shit I lived with for a year in Guadalajara.”

“Not a Mexican shit, though.”

“Worse,” she said. “An American one.”

Chapter 4

The Colonel and the Major General met at midnight in room 517 of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. They met in a room registered to Jerome Able, which was Colonel Ralph Millwed’s occasional nom de guerre and one he could document with a counterfeit Virginia driver’s license, a real VISA card and a spurious Social Security number.

If more identification were needed, and it almost never was during normal commercial transactions, the Colonel would simply change his mind and walk away. Virtually all hotels, motels and car rental agencies readily accepted the VISA card. Once done with the rooms and cars, the Colonel paid for them with cash discreetly peeled from the $3,000 roll he always carried in $50 and $100 bills.

The $3,000 roll was replenished from a permanent cash hoard of $100,000 kept in the pseudonymous Jerome Able’s safe-deposit box at a K Street branch of the Riggs National Bank. Whenever the hoard needed topping up, a fat wax-sealed brown envelope, stuffed with used hundreds and fifties, was delivered to the Colonel’s apartment on Wisconsin Avenue just south of the National Cathedral. The delivery man was always the same silent morose cabdriver who seldom spoke and never asked for a receipt.

At first glance the 49-year-old Major General, Walker L. Hudson, seemed completely bald. But closer inspection revealed a faint gray-blond band of stubble that went up and over one ear, spread down to and across the nape of the neck, then climbed back up and over the other ear.

Tall and lean, almost skinny, the General was a wedgehead with a curiously small thin mouth that snapped itself shut into a short mean line after each utterance. At the end of the yard-long arms were huge hands that, even in repose, managed to look restless. The General sat quietly in the small room’s only comfortable chair as his hands busied themselves with cigar, bourbon and water.

Neither the Colonel nor the General was in uniform. Instead, both wore dull suits, white shirts, muted ties and black shoes. Their topcoats were on the bed. Neither had worn a hat. After the General tasted his drink for the second time, he sighed and said, “Okay. Let’s have it.”

“He’s in L.A.,” Colonel Millwed said as he sat down on the room’s lone bed and tasted his own drink.

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