Стивен Хантер - G-Man

“Should we call Homer or Charlie Floyd? They’ve got names, they’re famous. Along with you, they’ll be next on the Division squash list.”

“I don’t have a number for them, and if I stop to make inquiries on the subject, that’s just what Mr. Melvin Asshole — excuse me, Helen — Purvis wants.”

“You can’t talk that way around the kids!” called Helen.

“The swearing really ticks her off,” Les confided.

“Dames got rules. All of ’em. Anyway, you’re right on the getaway, Les,” said J.P.

“That’s why I’ve lasted so long in this business. Hell, I’m almost twenty-six!”

Both laughed for the first time that day. They were young, beautiful, deadly gangsters after all. The world knew, loved, feared, and, best of all, respected them. The business involved a lot of fast moves as part of the craft, and if you couldn’t do that, you didn’t belong, as they both knew. Both knew they could lock themselves in a car and put hundreds of miles behind them in a day, rough roads or smooth, paved or dirt, grinding the American highways and state lines to powder behind them. That was part of the craft too.

“I got over fifty-five hundred dollars from South Bend still left,” Les said. “That’ll get us a long way. Maybe somewhere in Oklahoma or Arkansas we can pick up some more dough, some little country bank or something.”

“Got it. Oklahoma? We’re not headed to L.A. or Reno? They’re friendly towns.”

“And the Division knows that! No sir. We’re going to Texas. I got my eye on something Mr. Lebman has in San Antonio, and it can’t be any hotter there than it is here.”

“Is Helen okay with this?”

“I am fine,” said Helen from the bedroom. “Les always figures the right move.”

“Boy, did you get a peach!” said J.P.

“Ain’t that the truth. Now, let’s get the machinos in the trunk. The ammo too, though we could use a lot more. I want to be on the road before eight.”

McLEAN, VIRGINIA

The present

“Are we getting anywhere?” asked Bob. He sat in the easy chair in Nick’s den.

“Well… sort of. Let’s take a look. Evidence the old goat wasn’t an FBI agent — no mention in files, no official acknowledgment, no mention in any history of the period.”

“Doesn’t sound to me like we’ve made a dent in it.”

“The best thing is the retyped report pages, with what could have been Charles’s name replaced by a name of the exact same length as his own.”

“That one is pretty solid,” said Bob. “The others, not so much.”

“Voice in memo analyzing South Bend robbery, shooting, typical Swagger in understanding the dynamics of shooting situation. Then there’s the culture of the Director’s Bureau, where his word was absolute and the ability to erase dissenters from memory was just like Stalin’s. It certainly wasn’t beyond him to do it. If your grandfather was disappeared, I’ll bet others have been too.”

“Plausibility is not evidence.”

“Your granddad’s possession of a Colt .45 automatic, known to be assigned to the Division, from the Postal Department. The way it was worked over to increase speed shooting, as in arrests, again knowledge of a higher form probably appropriate to a gunfighter like Charles.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Certainly not convincing.”

“The badge.”

“Could have been picked up in a pawnshop.”

“But it’s been there since 1934. They would have been much harder to come by in 1934. Next, verified absence from Blue Eye and Polk County from June through December 1934.”

“He could have been on an epic drunk and off whoring in New Orleans.”

“A good Presbyterian like Charles?”

“Especially a good Presbyterian like Charles.”

“The fact that you think you’re being followed suggestive of… well, of exterior interest, shall we say, suggesting further there’s some mystery here we haven’t yet figured on.”

“Yeah, maybe.”

“The fact that he started his heavy drinking in late 1934, as per Mrs. Tisdale. It just gets worse and worse, until he’s finally going to the Baptists for help. Drink to forget? Drink to ease guilt? To make the blues go away? Whatever… Drinking.”

“Not evidentiary.”

“Finally the other contents in the strongbox and the map. This goofy thing. I had Jake send it.”

He pulled a tissue-wrapped object from his pocket and unrolled it — the cylinder of some mechanical provenance, sleek, bulbous, blued, slotted, produced by highly refined machinework, all angles square and sharp, all dimensions symmetrical, about twelve ounces of pure mystery.

“I guess I gotta go into the gun books on this one. Ugh. Or the car books or the airplane books or…”

The hopelessness of identifying a piece of oddly shaped metal out of the world’s inventory of oddly shaped metal across all applications daunted him.

“You haven’t gotten anywhere on the map, have you?”

“Nope, and that includes looking at every 1934-or-earlier house in Blue Eye for a similar configuration as what I take to be a wall. I suppose I could start on outlying homes and structures.”

“That’s an act of desperation.”

“I am desperate. Come on, you’re a detective. Detect something.”

“I detect that I need a drink.”

“Excellent. Wish I could join you.”

Nick rose, went to the bar in his study, poured himself a finger of Maker’s. It was twilight, midweek, moderate out, the sun through the window leaving streaks in the clouds. Nick disappeared, came back, having prepped the tumbler with a very large ice cube.

“Cheers,” said Nick, taking a sip. Then he asked, “Coke, soda, coffee, tea, dancing girls?”

“I’m fine. Oh, wait.”

Something was buzzing at his chest, either his heart announcing that it was about to quit or his iPhone signaling the arrival of an email. It was the latter, and he pulled out the iPhone to examine: it was from Jen.

“Just checking,” she wrote. “Remember you have that speech for Bill Tillotson next Tuesday. Thought you might forget.”

Ach. Bill Tillotson — Dr. Bill Tillotson — was head of the Idaho Veterinarians’ Association and a former marine officer, and he’d been after Bob for years to address a joint meet of the Vets’ group and the Marine Corps League. Finally, Bob had relented when it was so far in the future he didn’t have to think of it. Now it was on him and couldn’t be gotten out of. It meant he had to fly to Boise, though he’d given what he thought of as The Speech enough times, it was no difficulty and low-anxiety. It irked him, but maybe the removal from his quest for Charles might clear up his thinking.

“Trouble?” asked Nick.

“Nah. I just have to go home for a few days next week, that’s all.”

He was putting the phone back in his jacket pocket when it buzzed again.

“Ain’t I the popular one,” he remarked as he called up his emails on the device.

It was from Jake Vincent, at his law firm in Little Rock.

“Call me,” it said.

He dialed the number.

Jake answered right away.

“Great. How’s it going?” Jake asked.

“Out of leads,” said Bob.

“Well, something just came in. Sort of nuts, may scramble things more, but kind of interesting.”

“Please, shoot.”

“You remember the thousand-dollar bill, unissued and still wrapped, we found in the strongbox?”

“Yeah. We were just talking about it.”

“We returned it to Treasury and they tracked it for us — finally.”

“Please, tell me it was taken at South Bend, June seventeenth, 1934.”

“Wish I could,” said Jake. “But it was taken in a robbery, all right. On July twenty-fifth, 1934. A small town called Mavis, Arkansas, on the Texas — Arkansas border. Six thousand nine hundred fifty-five dollars was taken in loose cash… and a specially ordered money pack of five thousand, in five thousand-dollar bills, from the San Francisco Mint, ordered for a peculiar landowner who didn’t trust checks and paid in cash.”