“Perfectly,” I said.
Max stood a little taller and said, “You shouldn’t have gone out to see Broffski and Slater. The cover story was halfway okay, but frail. What you shouldn’t do, either of you or both of you, is push at this thing any more, from any direction. We’ve satisfied ourselves you can both keep your mouth shut about what you learned here. Finding out the kind of security clearance you had once upon a time, Meyer, helped in that decision. So lay low. Keep down. Bleep quiet. In return for that, I promise I’ll find some way to let you know when we’ve tidied up. No, don’t leave just yet. I have to make a call.”
He made it from a phone in a dispatch case. He grunted and listened, grunted and listened, then said thanks and hung up and slapped the case shut. No sign of your being followed here. There’s no directional bug on your pickup truck, and your home phones on those two boats are not tapped.”
“She died a week ago today,” I said. “She didn’t want to die. She was pushed over the edge. She was pushed off the earth. And you want me to keep down and keep quiet.”
Max looked at me with a pitying expression. ‘`If
The Green Ripper you wanted to thrash around, what could you do? Where could you start? Suppose you knew for sure that the DGI did it.”
“What’s the DGI?”
“The Cuban secret service. It has been directed and controlled by the KGB for nine years at least. What next? Who do you ask? Who do you go see? And who would know anything anyway? Is whoever killed her still alive? Maybe not Intelligence operations are compartmentalized, There is only one contact between cells, and few people in any cell. I don’t care what you do. Just don’t go to the police to complain about an unsolved murder, and don’t write your congressman about internal se- curity.”
“We can leave now?” Meyer asked.
Max nodded. Jake took a look at the corridor. We left. The day was the same kind of day. But the world was a different kind of world.
109
8
We were back aboard The Busted Flush by four o’clock. My brain seemed to be droning along in neutral. I could not kick it into gear.
Meyer selected a beer. I roamed back and forth with a beaker of Boodles on ice. “I don’t want it to be depersonalized,” I said. “I want it to be a single person with a single motive. I don’t want it to be organizational, a committee decision. You can’t get your hands around the throat of a committee. You can’t beat the face of an organization against a brick wall.”
“Listen to me, Travis. Stop pacing and listen. ~ she was killed because she discovered something, by pure accident, she should not have known, then
The Green Ripper it is accidental death. The world is full of secret plans and understandings. A sniper in Lebanon misses and the slug smashes the head of a child a half mile farther away. What can the child’s father dot Who does he see? Where does he file his complaint?”
“Somebody aimed at her, Meyer, and didn’t miss.”
“And your chance of ever finding that somebody is exactly zero.”
‘Then I’ll find who gave the orders.”
“Again zero.”
“How can you possibly know that?”
“Travis, please sit down. I can’t talk to you when you keep walking around behind me. There. That’s better. And if you can listen a little, it will be better yet. I live in two worlds, yours and the real world.”
“Come onl”
“Just listen. In your world the evil is small scale. It is one on one. It is creature preying on creature. All right, so it can be terrifying. I am not trying to say it is like games in a sandbox under the apple tree. A person can get killed doing what you do, and I think it is a worthwhile way for you to live. In these past few years it has made you a bit morose, but that is only because any kind of repeti- tion leads to a certain staleness of the soul. Too many beds, and too much dying. Greed and love begin to wear the same masks. Gretel gave me high hopes for you. You were emerging from the dolor of repetition. Now you look as if you had been hit on the head with a mallet. In your world, your heart is broken. I want to reach you before you start any kind of move that will break your heart on a larger scale than you can now conceive of. All right?”