Gordon Kent - The Spoils of War

“I read The New Yorker.”

“Some secret.”

Triffler looked up over the rims of his reading glasses. “ The New Yorker has an excellent track record. You should read it.”

“I don’t have time to read. So why the hell is this secret bunch of bureaucrats sending me a message to do what I already did anyway, namely get things moving on this guy who died in Tel Aviv?”

Triffler took off the glasses. “You’re a bureaucrat, too, after all.”

“That’s the worst thing you’ve ever called me.”

“No, it isn’t. You just didn’t hear the others. Done with me?”

“I smell fish. Rummy’s errand boys don’t send me messages by name. Somebody’s after me. Well?”

“Sounds right.”

“Check it out, will you?”

Triffler sighed. “If I say ‘Why me?’ will you do it yourself?”

“No time.”

Triffler sighed again. “The black man’s burden,” he said. He went back to his own office and got on the phone to a friend who taught public policy at Howard University. The woman was deep into Washington’s Democratic political scene, a good bet for elective office if she ever wanted it. “I need some information,” he said.

“Are you the Dick Triffler who’s tall, thin, and a dynamite dresser?”

“My word for it would be ‘elegant.’”

“Your wife is so lucky.”

“Tell her that.”

“Information is my middle name, honey; what d’you need?”

“There’s a new office in DoD called Information Analysis. I want to know who works there.”

“This administration’s pretty tight in the ass, hon.”

“You’d win my undying gratitude.”

“That your best offer?”

“At this distance, I’m afraid so.”

“I’ll see what I can do.”

What she did was call a grossly overweight but unpredictably vain man in the office of a member of the Congressional Black Caucus. He had been an aide for a decade, knew where bodies were buried and who had held the shovel. He loved information, which he hoarded and then dealt like cards in a game of cutthroat stud.

“What’re you offering, chickie?”

“Well, I was just offered undying gratitude, how’s that?”

He laughed. “For gratitude, I don’t even give out the correct time.”

She cajoled, joked, reminded him of her usefulness in promoting legislation for his member.

“You promoting my member, sweetie? You haven’t set eyes on my member yet!”

“Spare me the Clarence Thomas jokes. You going to get me what I want or not?” She let an edge show in her voice; he got it. Business was business, after all. He’d need her, she was saying—each in his turn. He sighed. “You one tough lady. I’ll get back.”

The fat man slicked his wavy hair back—shiny, very like Cab Calloway’s, he thought—and checked his reflection in a window and called a guy he knew at the Pentagon. “Whose dick I gotta lick to pry loose a list of folks in some shithouse called the Office of Information Analysis?” he said.

Tel Aviv

Tel Aviv is a city of beautiful women and ugly architecture; the first make up for the second. Craik found it a pleasure to walk.

The police station on Dizengoff Street was on a par with the city’s other buildings, but at least it looked as if being a cop was a good thing—clean, solid, windowless. The entrance didn’t invite you in but announced that going in, with the right credentials, would be easier than getting out with the wrong ones.

He showed his passport and his part-timer’s NCIS badge. “Commander Craik, US Navy. About the death of Qatib, Salem.”

The policewoman at the inquiries desk spoke better Hebrew than she did English, but she wrote some things down and got on a telephone. Meanwhile, a plain-clothes detective was looking Alan over and probably realizing that he wasn’t armed—Alan, like most of the men in Tel Aviv, was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and slacks—while Alan was looking him over and deciding that the extra tuck on the right side of his shirt covered an in-the-waistband holster, and his slightly cocked left foot might suggest an ankle gun.

People went by as if they were heading for a somber event, heads down, moving fast. The space was big, harshly echoing, lighted with banks of fluorescents overhead; the noise of footsteps was like some sort of clattering engine. Move, move, the noise, the atmosphere seemed to say; get in and get out, don’t linger, we’re serious here.

“Commander Alan Craik?”

The man was blond, chunky, purposely likable. He had a Browning nine-millimeter in a very visible shoulder holster and he smiled as if he really was glad to see Alan. Maybe he was simply glad to see anybody who would allow him to strike an item off his to-do list. “Detective Sergeant Berudh.”

They shook hands. Berudh led him toward a bank of elevators, one hand behind Alan’s left arm; he was chattering about the building—how big it was, how many different offices it housed, how many crimes they covered a day. “You’re US Navy,” he said abruptly. “Not from a ship, I think.”

“No, not from a ship.” Habit kept him from saying where he was stationed just then. Which was absurd, of course, because the Israelis would already know. And they were allies. More or less.

Berudh was silent in the elevator, surrounded as they were by worried-looking people who were certainly not police. The elevator smelled of nervousness, Alan thought. Then two young women got on, smiling, bouncy, and chattered as the elevator rose. They worked there and seemed to say, “What is there to be nervous about?”

“Only the police are at home in a police station,” he said when they got off.

“And why not? Everybody’s guilty about something.” Berudh led the way down a corridor. “Most of them are here for permits, licenses, getting papers stamped, but they feel guilty. Actually, it makes the job easier.” He held a door open. “You’re NCIS?”

Alan explained that he had a badge but it was left over from earlier duty. “The special agent in charge of NCIS, Naples, asked me to do this for him.”

“Scut work,” Berudh said and gave him the smile. Berudh spoke American English with a slight accent, clearly knew American slang. “We work with NCIS when there are ships in Haifa, stuff like that. Sailors come down here, get in the usual trouble sailors do, we have to arrest them, blah-blah-blah. But we’re all friends.”

He was leading Alan through a room that had half a dozen desks in it, fluorescent lights overhead, a computer on each desk and a man or woman working at each one. More guns were in evidence here, some hung in their holsters on chairbacks.

“Okay.” Berudh sat behind the only empty desk, pulled a metal chair over for Alan. He offered coffee or tea or soda, told a quick joke, surprised Alan by asking to see his ID. “I know you ID’d yourself at the door and at reception, but it’s a rule. Death is serious business, isn’t it?” He looked over the passport and the badge, made some notes, and sat back. “Okay.”

He had a thin pile of photocopies and computer printouts. He began to hand them across the desk, naming each one as he did so—“Initial contact sheet—log sheet—physician’s report—death certificate—telephone log, that’s only to show when we notified your embassy—” The pages were clean, all typed, neat, efficient, but in a language Alan couldn’t read. Berudh explained that Qatib, Salem, had begun his police connection as an unidentified corpse in Jaffa, another of Tel Aviv’s sub-districts, then been logged in as a homicide, then identified from missing-person calls placed by his family.

Alan could have taken the papers then and left, but a perverse sense of duty made him ask questions he wasn’t at all interested in. “How come if he was found in Jaffa, you’re handling it here?”