Paul Kavanagh - Such Men Are Dangerous

“I’ll take your word.”

“No immediate doubts, No great show of surprise?”

“None.” I stood up. “I saw it coming.”

He looked worried.

“I made a mistake,” I told him. “I should have drowned you before. All I had to do was do nothing, leave you there in the water. I could have used you for fishbait and your boat for firewood and no one would ever have come looking for you. No, don’t get up. Don’t even try, or I’ll knock you down again. They don’t know you’re here. They lost interest in me the day I checked out of the Doulton. You’re all on your own.”

“Paul—”

“Shut up. This isn’t an Agency job, it’s your job. All yours. The last time I saw you, the only other time I saw you, you told me my trouble was that I learned how to think. Don’t forget it. You told me I wouldn’t take a black pill. I won’t take one with a sugar coating either. You want me for something, then you give it to me straight and I say yes or no.”

He started to get up. I let him get most of the way, then kicked his feet out from under him.

I said, “There are two things you can do. You can stick to your lie or find a new one, and if you do I’ll know it, and I’ll take you out and drown you. Or you can start over without the frills and do it right. It’s your move.”

“You would drown me.”

“You already knew that.”

“We had a meal together, we talked, and you would drown me.”

“Oh, cut the shit.”

“You’re a beauty. They never should have let you get away. I knew it the day I talked to you, I saw things that wouldn’t fit on their graphs. I knew you’d crack and I knew you’d mend, and—”

“Leave me out. Let’s hear it.”

“Sure,” he said. “You may not like it, but this time it’s straight. And it’s a honey.”

It wasn’t bad. Everything was about as he had described it, he explained, except that the United States government wasn’t in on it. Both the military and the civilian intelligence people had it on very good authority that the whole shipment had already arrived in South America, and the Agency was busy rushing men to that area to try to minimize the damage.

“But it isn’t there, Paul. It’s still in the States. I know it, and I have to be the only person who does. Nobody came and told me. There was data coming across my desk, miscellaneous bits and pieces that didn’t add up to anything concrete. You could feed the whole mess to a computer and not even find out what time it was.”

But he sensed something, enough to make it worth his while to take a quiet little trip west. He nosed around and found out he was right. He already had me traced as far as Florida. A private investigator placed me in Key West, and he did the rest of the detecting himself.

“You remember that conversation we had? I was talking to myself as much as to you. I could put this package on the right desk and come out neck deep in glory. I don’t want glory anymore. I’d rather be up to my neck in money.”

He figured a half share would come to a million dollars. A half share was all he wanted. With that kind of money around, all of it tax-free, it made no sense to haggle over a split. A million dollars was a footnote in an administrative budget. It was also his present take-home pay for the next eighty-seven years and seven months. And it was one half of what he was certain he could get from a well-heeled refugee group in Tampa.

“They’re in the same camp as the good guys who were originally set to receive the stuff. That’s the real beauty of it, Paul. They’re on the same side. The goods go to their original destination, the U.S. comes out clean, our friends down south avoid getting themselves atomized, and you and I cut up a two-million-dollar pie.”

There were more details, fine points. I let him finish. Then he asked me what I thought, and I said I wanted to think it over, and he told me that was just the answer he hoped I’d give him. He finished his last cigarette, and I walked him down to the boat to get his other pack. He opened it and flipped the strip of cellophane away. I didn’t say anything about it. He lit up and asked me if I didn’t feel chilly. I said I didn’t, that I rarely noticed temperature changes. He said he wished his clothes were dry. I waited until he had finished his cigarette and flipped it into the water. It was amazing how quickly he forgot to behave.

“Beautiful out here,” he said. “Really beautiful.”

“It is,” I said.

Then I spun him around and stabbed three fingers into his gut two inches south of his navel. I pulled it enough so that nothing would get ruptured. He doubled up in agony but couldn’t make a sound. That’s one of the nice things about that particular jab.

The next thing he knew he was on his back in two feet of water, just about halfway between the top and the bottom.

I kept him under for maybe ten seconds. His eyes were open, but it was impossible to catch his expression in that light, not with the water in the way.

I pulled him up and let him sputter and breathe. I didn’t say anything, and he couldn’t. Then I stuck him under again.

Ten more seconds and I brought him up. I had never before seen such terror on a human face. I wasn’t doing anything to him, he wasn’t even swallowing any water, but that hardly mattered. He was in very bad shape.

“You’re about to go down for the third time,” I told him gently. “The third time is the charm. You seem to think that you have to tell me what I want to hear, but all I want to hear is the truth. Forget about persuading me. Concentrate on staying alive.”

He didn’t say a word. His mouth moved but that was all.

“You’ve got ten seconds, George.” If he wanted me to call him George this was a good time to start. “It shouldn’t take you more than three sentences. When your time’s up you go under, so you’d better finish before I get bored.”

The words came out of him in one uninflected stream, no punctuation anywhere. But it only added up to two sentences.

“The government still has the stuff in a warehouse. It won’t be shipped but we can steal it and split two million cash.”

The following Monday I wore work clothes into a barber shop in Orlando. I was cleanshaven but shaggy. I walked out with a crewcut. I took a bus to Jacksonville, and in the men’s room of the Greyhound station I changed to a suit and covered the crew cut with a wig. In Jacksonville I rented a Plymouth from a national car-rental agency, using a Florida driver’s license made out to Leonard Byron Phelps. I drove the car to Atlanta and destroyed the license as soon as I had turned in the car. I flew to New Orleans, where I disposed of the wig. I used three different airlines and as many names to reach Minneapolis. I slept on planes and dozed in terminals, but didn’t stop at any hotels en route. In Minneapolis there was a foot of snow on the ground and a raw wind that never quit. I had three double whiskeys at a downtown bar and spent sixteen hours at a Turkish bath. I did a little sweating and a lot of sleeping, but I made sure I fitted in a massage and alcohol rub. The rubdown made my suntan a little less pronounced.

The tan was the one thing that bothered me. It would have made me conspicuous anywhere, but in that part of the country at that time of year it drew stares from everyone. I had a cover to explain it — that wasn’t the problem. It was just that I wanted to avoid being memorable. My shape and size are ordinary enough, my face is forgettable, and the tan was the only thing that got in the way.

I had tried a skin bleach earlier. I bought it in a Negro neighborhood in Atlanta. It was a sale the clerk may never forget. I tried it out in a lavatory, testing it on a portion of my anatomy which I rarely expose to the public. The effect was blotchy and unnatural. I suppose repeated applications might have had the desired effect, but it didn’t seem worth the risk.