Brian Freemantle: Charlie Muffin U.S.A.

Bowler nodded, accepting the instruction. ‘Saw Mrs Pendlebury,’ he said.

‘How was she?’

‘Broken up,’ said Bowler. ‘Apparently they didn’t have any savings. She’ll have to let the house go… asked if we could help.’

‘What did you say?’

‘That there’d be a pension, of course. But that we couldn’t make any ex-gratia payments.’

‘Right!’ agreed Warburger immediately. ‘Do it once and there’d be a queue a mile long.’

‘There are the expenses,’ Bowler reminded him. ‘I suppose she’s entitled to them. You held them all back.’

The Director nodded in recollection. ‘They were very high,’ he said, defensively. ‘I was going to have him cut them by at least twenty-live per cent. In the first week, the cocky bastard charged eight lunches, for Christ’s sake!’

‘He’s dead,’ pointed out the deputy.

Warburger hesitated. ‘We’ll compromise,’ he said. ‘Reduce them by ten per cent.’

‘Pity about Jack,’ said Bowler reflectively.

‘Yes,’ agreed Warburger. ‘Good man…’ He looked up. ‘They were all good men,’ he said, suddenly angry. ‘I’m damned if I’ll let Langley get away with it. I want them fixed. Do you hear me? Fixed!’

‘I hear you,’ said Bowler.

The two men were silent for a long time. Then Warburger said, ‘We’ve come out of this badly, even though all the blame is on the C.I.A.’

‘I know,’ said Bowler.

‘It’ll take a long time to recover.’

‘Yes,’ said the other man.

There was another silence, but this time Warburger remained staring at his deputy. ‘He showed me,’ said Warburger at last.

‘Showed you?’

‘The Attorney-General. He showed me your report saying that you opposed the operation from the start.’

‘He demanded it,’ blurted Bowler anxiously. ‘He said he wanted personal reactions throughout the executive.’

‘I know,’ said Warburger. ‘It wasn’t loyal though, was it?’

‘I said I came around to supporting the operation,’ began Bowler.

‘Under pressure,’ qualified Warburger. ‘And because you hadn’t much of an alternative.’

‘I didn’t intend any disloyalty,’ insisted Bowler.

‘I know you didn’t. You intended to guard your own back. I understand that, Peter. It’s a natural enough reaction. I’m still disappointed.’

Bowler realised that if the Attorney-General had shown Warburger the file, the man had talked his way out of any personal blame. He wondered upon whom the Director had managed to shift the responsibility.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

‘So am I, Peter. Very sorry. I’ll expect a change in future.’

‘Yes,’ said Bowler. Desperate to move Warburger on, he said, ‘Do you want men assigned to this Cuban thing?’

‘Yes,’ said the Director. ‘And I don’t give a damn if Langley discovers it, either.’

‘What about Terrilli?’

Warburger leaned back in his chair, head tilted upwards, considering an answer. It was several minutes before he sat forward, reluctantly shaking his head.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We daren’t try anything more.’

‘So we failed?’

‘Yes,’ agreed Warburger, ‘we failed.’

It was several seconds before Bowler realised that the Director had spoken looking directly at him and at that moment Bowler answered his own question. He knew exactly who had been blamed for the disaster.

Williamson had known that if Ramirez had been captured he risked identification and so he had lingered in the foyer, anonymous among the other hotel residents, trying to discover what had happened. He had listened to Cosgrove’s impromptu press conference, devoted almost entirely to the man’s boasts of involvement and commitment against organised crime, then actually risked asking one of the reporters, who hadn’t known any more than he did.

Sleep had been impossible, of course. Williamson had sat in his room fully clothed, alert for any sound in the corridor outside, suppressing the desire to run because of the attention it might draw from any investigation. It wasn’t until the early radio bulletin the following morning that he learned that all the Cubans had been killed and so finally knew that he was safe. Relief had trembled through him and with it came the awareness that Moscow would regard this as a completely successful mission.

He had slept at last and by the time he had awakened, at midday, the radio, television and newspapers had the C.I.A. connection, and Williamson smiled, admiring the speed at which Kalenin had moved.

There was still a great deal of police activity. By mid-afternoon they had reached him, working on a floor by floor check of the rooms. A fresh-faced uniformed policeman politely asked him if he had been aware of anything unusual around the exhibition the previous night, and equally politely Williamson assured him he had not. The policeman thanked him, drew a line through his name and moved on to the adjoining room, and Williamson realised the wisdom of not panicking.

It was five o’clock when Williamson went down to the foyer to make his booking for San Diego, wondering about Pendlebury. He found the man’s name in the official list of F.B.I. dead in a late edition of the Miami Herald. There was an officially released picture, which must have been taken soon after Pendlebury joined the Bureau. He hadn’t been as fat then and his clothes seemed neater. The newspaper said he was forty-two. Williamson would have guessed at another five years, at least.

While he was making his reservation, he became aware of Cosgrove’s flustered departure. There seemed to be a dispute about the responsibility for a cancelled party, ending with the senator’s shouted insistence that the account be sent to his Washington office. The man’s wife seemed tight-lipped and angry too, Williamson thought. Their attitude towards the surrounding reporters had changed overnight.

Williamson caught the early plane to San Diego on the Thursday, reported his return to his employers, who were still sympathetic over the death of his father, and with three days’ leave before he had to return to work, decided to make a weekend of it. He drove up to Los Angeles. The Rams beat the Rowdies three goals to nil in one of the best games he had seen that season.

Rupert Willoughby had sat unspcaking and motionless as Charlie had recounted the story, and even when Charlie stopped talking there was no immediate response. Then he breathed out noisily, an almost disbelieving sound.

‘Good God!’he said.

‘It almost worked,’ said Charlie.

‘So Terrilli escaped?’

‘It might appear so, from the outside. I suspect he’ll be handled by his own people.’

‘But that won’t stop the drug running?’

‘No,’ agreed Charlie. ‘It won’t stop that. It might hinder it for a while, that’s all.’

‘Thank you for keeping Clarissa out of it,’ said the underwriter unexpectedly.

‘She seemed annoyed.’

‘Did she?’ said Willoughby. ‘She’s got over it, if she was.’

‘Good.’

‘She wants you to come to dinner. Asked me to make arrangements with you today.’

Charlie stretched elaborately. ‘I’m still jet-lagged,’ he said.

‘Wednesday?’

‘I’ll call you,’ replied Charlie doubtfully.

‘Make sure you do,’ urged Willoughby. ‘I’d love her to hear what really went on… as much as she could be told, anyway. And she seems to have helped, even though she didn’t realise fully what she was being asked to do.’

‘You tell her,’ said Charlie.

‘Something wrong?’ asked Willoughby, frowning.

‘Of course not,’ said Charlie. He had not expected to feel this degree of guilt, confronting Willoughby for the first time.