Росс Томас - The Fools in Town Are on Our Side

We sat in the office that Letterman General had assigned him, the one in the sealed-off suite that was painted a depressing tan and contained a gray desk and four matching chairs and whose lone window offered a gloomy view of the rear of the hospital’s kitchen.

“Okay,” I said. “Now that I’m all tidied up and sweet-smelling, you can start.”

“Well, to begin with,” he said, “it wasn’t my idea.”

“Whose was it?”

“Mugar’s.”

“I don’t know any Mugar.”

“He’s new.”

“I’m sure he is,” I said. “What about the lie detector? Whose idea was that? Mugar’s again?”

“They were dead set against Li Teh,” Carmingler said and dragged on his pipe. “It was all I could think of.”

“Then you’re losing your touch. Five years ago you could have thought of a dozen ways, but five years ago you weren’t in love with a polygraph.”

“They wanted to make sure,” he said. “They had to be positive about Li.”

“All of them?”

“Most of them.”

“How many?” I said.

“There were five of us. Me, Mugar, Reo, Werbin, and Pilalas.”

“What side was the Greek on?”

“He was the only one with me. He’d go along, but the other three wouldn’t. They were following Mugar.”

“How old’s Mugar?”

“I don’t know; twenty-eight, twenty-nine.”

“And he’s this year’s new boy,” I said.

“Very new. But he bought the polygraph.”

I sighed and lit another cigarette. My tenth for the morning. “It doesn’t matter now. Li’s dead. I’m blown all over Asia. I just want to know what happened.”

“It was a mess,” Carmingler said. “A real fuck-up.” Carmingler never swore unless he meant it and when he got through describing what had happened, I could see that he did.

“They thought you were CIA, of course,” he said. “That started it.”

I nodded. Then Carmingler told me the rest of it. On the perfectly sound theory that the United States’ left hand seldom knows what its right big toe is doing, the premier of the island city-state republic decided to make two approaches, one to the State Department and one to the CIA who, they mistakenly thought, employed me. It was their Foreign Minister himself who summoned the local U.S. ambassador and then confronted him with extensive documentation that proved beyond doubt that American agents had been fiddling with his country’s affairs. The Foreign Minister demanded a written apology from the U.S. Secretary of State. The U.S. ambassador promptly dispatched copies of the damaging material to Washington where the Secretary of State, new to his job and anxious to please, went through the usual seventh-floor shilly-shallying and then wrote, or had someone write, the letter of apology (an almost unheard of gesture) which promised that the culprits (meaning Shoftstall, Bourland, and me) would be severely disciplined. The Secretary himself was under the impression that we were with CIA. He didn’t bother to check.

It was my former prison host, Mr. Tung, who approached the CIA. He made the approach in Djakarta, Carmingler said, and when he demanded the thirty million dollar ransom, they just laughed at him. They didn’t check with anyone either; they just laughed. It was the wrong thing to do, of course. Mr. Tung merely smiled back and then hurried across the street (or wherever it was) to the local British MI-6 representative and told him all about how the Americans no longer trusted their English colleagues and were running their own agents on what by gentlemen’s agreement, had been considered the private turf of Perfidious Albion. Actually, Carmingler said, the CIA was thinking about it. They just hadn’t gotten around to it yet.

“Well, the British got most upset,” he said. “They accused the CIA of double-dealing and God knows what else. The CIA just kept on denying that any of you belonged to them. They had no choice, of course.”

“There’s always a choice,” I said.

“Name it.”

I could think of a number of things, but I let it pass. Having brought the British in and carefully bruised their already tender sensibilities, Tung then leaked the whole story to the press.

“Made headlines everywhere. Every damned place you could think of, and the British got sore all over again.” His pipe had gone out so Carmingler used four matches to light it. He seemed to have forgotten his Phi Beta Kappa key, which I thought was just as well. “So all CIA could do was to deny again that you were one of them. They didn’t know about the Secretary’s letter. State hadn’t bothered to tell them about that. Then the premier himself called a press conference, distributed Xeroxed copies of the letter, and made a feisty little speech that lasted an hour all about how the United States was trying to dominate Asia through a program of subversion and what have you. He even hinted that he might play those tapes for the press — you know, the ones that they got in your hotel room.”

“Did he?”

“No. But he said — and he was lying, of course — that we had offered him thirty million dollars in foreign aid to release the three of you, and he said that he had evidence to prove it. Well, he did have that fool letter of apology from the Secretary. That was real enough. The British were still fuming and leaking stuff all over the place, so the press went along. Can’t say I blame them really. More headlines, and God, the editorials. The New York Times called it a ‘tragedy of errors.’ The Washington Post said it was ‘inane chicanery.’ And the New York Daily News wanted somebody ‘horsewhipped.’ So the word came down from the White House. Buy them out no matter how much.”

“How much was it?” I said.

Carmingler gave me his need to know look. “Oh, they still asked for thirty million, but it was less than that. Much, much less.”

“Ten cents on the dollar,” I said. “Three million.”

Carmingler glared at me suspiciously. “Only six persons in the country are supposed to know that.”

“Now you can make it seven.”

“Who told you?”

“A wily Oriental.”

The deep flush started at the top of Carmingler’s faultless collar and rose slowly until it reached his temples. It made him look like a traffic light that would never say go again. He sucked away on his pipe and fooled with his Phi Beta Kappa key at the same time, a sure sign that he was upset.

“I assume,” he said, spitting the words at me from around his pipe, “that the wily Oriental also told you why you were kept in solitary.”

I shrugged. “Standard procedure, I suppose.”

“You suppose wrong. Has it occurred to you that we could debrief you in Hong Kong just as well as we could in San Francisco? After all, Hong Kong’s been your home for the past ten years. You probably have more friends there than you do in the States.”

“It crossed my mind,” I said, “and since it might make you feel better, I’ll ask why — about both the solitary and being hustled back to the States, although I don’t mind that. I left nothing in Hong Kong except some cheap suits in my hotel and some equally cheap books. My car was leased and my bank account wasn’t over two hundred dollars.”

“You were paid enough.”

“I’m a spendthrift.”

The flush in Carmingler’s face had receded. He put his pipe carefully into the ashtray and placed the palms of his hands flat on the table. His elbows jutted out as he leaned toward me. He looked something like a middle-aged turkey who thought he would try to fly just one more time.

“They kept you in solitary and we brought you back here because Li Teh’s people have put a price on your head.” He enjoyed saying that.