“A riddle?”
“Somewhat. I was on the phone at a reasonable morning hour, calling old friends in Washington.
The Green Ripper
There are a lot of offices up there. And strange titles. Deputy Director to the Assistant Director in charge of the Policy Committee on Administration. The phone directory is gigantic. I gave them the in- formation and set them to scurrying about. I gave the same mission to three quite different people in three quite different departments, and then waited for the results. The last call came in fifteen minutes ago. That phone number they gave you is not an operating number. There is not now and never has been, at least in living memory, any Select Commit- tee on Special Resources. The central register of all civil servants has no Robert A. Toomey, but it does have two Richard E. Klines. One is twenty-five and works for the Department of the Interior in Alaska. The other is sixty-one and based in Guam. Interesting?”
My head was too full of fragments, like a kaleidoscope, making its bright patterns of nonsense. I had decided that when they had visited me, my reaction had been paranoid.
‘I don’t know what to think, Meyer. Don’t they have departments sort of hidden away, without public records and so forth?”
“So why give you a bad phone number?”
“Maybe you would like to try to make sense out of it.”
“Too many parts missing,” he said. He got up and roamed around the lounge, sighing audibly, pausing to look out the port, then resuming his circuit. “High-level inquiry,” he said.
“What?”
“Excuse me. I’m talking to myself.”
He roamed and muttered and finally sat down. He gave me a bright false smile. “It’s all too melodramatic. There is but one way I can make the parts fit together, and it offends me.”
“See if it offends me.”
“It will more than offend, Travis. All right. Postulate X. X is an unknown force, group, movement, with unknown objectives. X is powerful and has high-priority objectives. Secrecy is imperative. Brother Titus represents the syndicate in Brussels, and he came down here from another part of the country to take a look at the land and make contact with Mr. Ladwigg. The odds against anyone seeing him and recognizing him are astronomical. But that is one way in which life is consistently quirky. It keeps serving up unlikely coincidences. Gretel told us her story about Brother Titus on December seventh. And she said she had seen him last week,’ if I remember correctly. Not ‘this week,’ last week.’ The last week in November. Brother Titus went back to X and reported being recognized. For some reason, this created a great danger to the high-priority objective. They had a wee} in which to plan and move. Their representatives were in the area by mid-week, perhaps, or earlier. On Saturday morning Ladwigg fell off his bike and died. Gretel was
68 ‘ – The Green Ripper taken ill on Saturday. They are the only two, we can assume, who saw Titus face to face. Toomey and Kline came here Saturday to find out if Gretel told you about him. From what you told me of the questioning, they would have gotten the information from anyone less wary than you.”
“What the hell are you trying to say?”
“I told you the reconstruction is so melodramatic * offends me. If you had told them all about Brother Titus, as related by GreteL right now you might be in the hospital, fading fast.”
I thought it over. I could not make it seem real. “Okay, why the charade? If what is going on is so important, why not just wait until dark, thump my skull, and let me go out on the tide?”
‘`They do not want to create curiosity. A man falls off his bike and dies. One of the young women who work for him falls ill and dies. The authorities can accept that as routine. But what if the womants best friend should then die accidentally, or be taken ill in the same way?”
“The authorities would assume the friend caught it from her, whatever it was.”
“But that would create a big flap. Gretel’s illness and death were reported, you said, to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta.”