Brian Garfield - Checkpoint Charlie

Grebe lifted his eyes from the papers. He didn’t speak at all. He only watched me, reserving judgment.

I said, “When the I.S. investigation came down, Myerson was in a trap and there wasn’t any way out of it. He couldn’t bluff it out because obviously Yaskov double-crossed him by tipping you. Yaskov always wanted to get Myerson and me out of the way — he’s spent half his life tripping over us and we’ve bested him too often to suit him. When I bluffed him out of Finland a year or two ago it must have been the last straw. First he dug up something on Myerson. He blackmailed Myerson into compromising himself. Then he betrayed Myerson’s treachery to you. Yaskov knew that would get Myerson out of his way — which also gets me out of the way, since without Myerson the Agency won’t keep me on.”

I gave Grebe an opening to speak but he only waited for me to finish; he knew I hadn’t the punch line yet.

I said, “Myerson knew he’d get fired at the very least. No pension, half his insurance canceled. He might be discredited, maybe go to prison, maybe be killed. I don’t know because I don’t know how serious the compromise was. Obviously Yaskov found some way to blackmail Myerson into doing the Russians a favor or two — and Yaskov must have kept the evidence of those favors. Whatever it was, Myerson had to know there was no way to get Yaskov off his back. So Myerson took the only way out but he hated me so much he had to take me with him.”

Grebe sat bolt upright. “What? You’re saying Myerson killed himself?”

“Of course he did. But he made it look like murder. Because the insurance wouldn’t have paid off on a suicide. And he made me look like the killer — and the traitor — because he needed a plausible murderer. He set me up with the motive, the means and the opportunity.”

Grebe settled back. “It’s a clever hypothesis, Charlie, but there’s no evidence to support it.”

“There are bits and pieces. One thing is those travel vouchers. They show I wasn’t the only one in the section who could have had those meetings with Yaskov. Another thing — why did he choose that morning to go shooting at the rod-and-gun club if he didn’t need an excuse for the fresh gunpowder on his shooting glove? And why did he move the Yaskov file over to the Inactive drawer if he didn’t want us to notice the shift? And there’s one other thing he didn’t take into account. It’s true that I was in on April third but I was only there four hours — it was an airport meeting with several Interpol people to update our data on one of the terrorist groups and I was never out of sight of half a dozen police executives. I couldn’t possibly have met Yaskov there, so that suggests all the ‘M.S.’ reports are fakes.”

Grebe chewed a pencil; the rest of them smoked and reached for their styrofoam coffee cups and it was clear what they were thinking: they were picturing Myerson on the lip of the embankment shooting himself in the chest rather than the head because he needed time to toss the revolver onto the passing train after he’d used it on himself; then dragging himself up away from the lip, not noticing the bloodstains he was leaving behind on the grass, and finally collapsing there and curling up like a strip of frying bacon, his last thoughts probably sour and resentful and filled with obscure regrets and rage. He’d been a bitter man always, a hearty politician on the surface with his clubhouse tan and his locker-room humor but that had been facade and the real Myerson had been a man who only took real pleasure in the suffering of others. He’d had fits of terrible depression throughout the years I’d known him. Tension and anxiety and inadequacy had characterized his life and suicide was not out of character for him, nor was his final parting shot — the attempt to frame his most intimate enemy for his own murder. That was what they were thinking, Grebe and his men.

Grebe said, “We’ll take it under advisement, Charlie. Stick close to the shop until we let you know what’s next, all right?”

In Myerson’s office Joe Cutter and I shared out a brown-bagged lunch of liverwurst-on-ryes. Joe’s teeth crunched a pickle. “You didn’t prove the case for the defense,” he said, “but at least you cast a reasonable doubt on the prosecution’s case. But they’re going to put you out to pasture all the same, you know. Gold watch and a pension. I wouldn’t call it a triumph.”

He looked up then, suddenly angry. “You deserve better, Charlie. I hate to see it end this way.”

I gave him a smile. “It won’t. This is not Charlie’s last caper.”

“Say again?”

“We’ll never know whether I was right or wrong, will we. Not until we get the truth out of Mikhail Yaskov.”

He went completely still, fingers poised on the pickle. “What?”

I said, “Yaskov’s the only one who knows, Joe.”

“Come on. You’re not going after Yaskov. On your own? Behind the Iron Curtain? At your age? Charlie, you can’t be serious.”

I grinned, though. “I guess I can.”