“Long shot here: did he ever show any interest in a gun called a Red Nine, an old German automatic pistol?”
“You know, it was always one gun or another, but they didn’t stick in my mind. I could check his books, I suppose. He was forever buying gun books from Amazon. The one-click shopping was his financial ruin.”
“That would be a help. I have one other question. This one is strange. It’s so strange, I can’t believe I’m asking it.”
“Wow, I can’t wait,” she said.
“It’s about literature.”
“Not exactly a small topic. I’ll try.”
“This puzzle, which involves both Nabokov and Red Nine, was put together by a guy who loved literature. His office was crammed with fiction books, up, down, everywhere, with underlines and commentary on what he was reading, all of them alphabetized, all of them in good shape, which I take to mean that they were of great value to him. He knew, loved, dreamed, and breathed literature. Fiction stories, anyway. So the puzzle might reflect that, and guess who’s stupid about it? Me.”
“I doubt you’re stupid about anything, but go on.”
“My question is, do you know somebody who really knows literature? I have to find a principle to uncork the message in the bottle, and I don’t even know what the cork would be, much less the bottle. I thought if I could talk to someone who knows and loves it, maybe that person would see something I never could or would say something that might organize my thinking in a helpful way.”
She paused. “There’s a creative writing department at Johns Hopkins that’s supposed to— No, no, wait, I have another idea. There’s a nice woman in town named Susan Beckham. She’s published a series of novels that have been extremely well received. She sent me a wonderful note when Jimmy died. She doesn’t talk to the press. She doesn’t want to ‘give too much away,’ she says. She’s the only writer left in the world who doesn’t court publicity. I could call her. This is exactly the kind of intriguing question that she might like. And as I say, she’s nice.”
She was nice.
They met at three the next afternoon in a coffee shop in a utopian village in Baltimore called Cross Keys, where it was possible to forget the ugliness of the rat- and crime-infested city just beyond the fence.
She was willowy, her reddish hair shot with gray, her freckles still visible into her fifties. Well-turned-out in pantsuit and glasses and low heels, she could have been a mom, a vice president, a lawyer, a teacher.
“Hi,” he said. “I’m Swagger. Miss Beckham?”
“Mr. Swagger,” she said, rising, offering a hand, “it’s nice to meet you. Jean told me you were an extraordinary man, a real hero in the old-fashioned sense.”
“She got the ‘old’ part right, anyway. All that was a million years ago. Even then I was lucky. The real heroes came back in boxes. Only us fakes came back on two legs.”
“I saw a limp as you walked in.”
“Okay, a leg and a half, then.”
That got him a smile. He sat down across from her.
“I’ve never solved a puzzle in my life,” she said, “so I don’t know how I can help you. But I’ll give it a try.”
“Thank you, ma’am. Here it is. There was an old CIA fellow whose job was making up phony biographies for agents overseas. He was good at it, because he had a creative mind and he knew a whole lot of stuff. He may have made up a name for someone, and I’m trying to find that man. Here is what I’ve found out so far.”
Swagger told her of the office full of novels, the special love of Nabokov and his puns and gamesmanship, and finally, the synesthesia that Niles and Vlad shared. “I know it’s hard to believe, but—”
“Mr. Swagger, I happen to be an expert on the tricks the mind can play on people. I believe it completely.”
“So that’s it. I’m thinking you’ll see a pattern or come up with a question I should ask, or might have an idea that—”
“Tell me what writers he had in his library.”
“Some I knew, many I didn’t. A few years back I read a lot of post–World War II novels. So I recognized The Big War by Anton Myrer, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, Away All Boats by Kenneth Dodson, and The War Lover by John Hersey. And famous important writers, Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Updike, all the famous foreigners, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Trollope, Woolf, le Carré, a lot of those Modern Library classics.”
“He had refined tastes.”
“Not quite. There was also a lot of what you might call junk. Crime stuff, thrillers, that sort of thing. A couple of books by James Aptapton. Lots of paperbacks, people like Hammond Innes, Jim Thompson, Nevil Shute, James M. Cain, Dashiell Hammett, someone called Richard S. Prather, John D. MacDonald, another Mac—Ross Macdonald—books that, from their title or their cover, seemed to be about crime or murder. It was all mixed up. He wasn’t a snob, I’m guessing. If it had a good story, he’d learn from it. All the books felt read—you know, all the spines were limber, most were marked up, he had one of those ex libris labels in each one with his name. He was a hard, serious reader of stories. Nabokov, he had every Nabokov thing, some in Russian, even. Are you getting anything?”
She sighed. “No, not really. Only this, and I don’t see how it would be any help at all. It has nothing to do with synesthesia, colors, Russian lit, Nabokov, anything.”
“Please, who knows, maybe it’s the key.”
“One thing he would have learned over a lifetime of reading assiduously in both serious and pop literature is the difference between the clichéd and the authentic.”
“Yes ma’am,” Swagger said. “Clichéd and authentic.”
Without humiliating him by asking if he knew what that meant, she went ahead, after a sip of her coffee. “Clichéd. Meaning written to a formula, familiar from a hundred other stories, with certain expectations. If you’ve read it before, it’s a cliché, but clichés are so insidious that many fine professional writers don’t notice them. And they’re comforting, like the furniture in an old house. They’re prominent in some of the pop writers you mentioned. Examples: the rescue in the nick of time. The hero and heroine falling in love at first glance. The hero winning the fight every time and never getting shot.”
“You do get shot in gunfights,” Bob said.
“Exactly. You know that, but many of these writers don’t. They just know that for the formula to pay off, the hero has to survive.”
“I get you.”
“On the other side—and please understand it has its own pitfalls—is what I’m calling the authentic. By that I mean the normal, the undramatic, the small. The world is never at risk. No one ever mentions a sum of a million dollars. People misbehave, get angry, forget things, come down with colds, lose the grocery list. The hero has terrible flaws that cripple him. No plan ever works right. The universe is largely indifferent to the fate of the characters. But life counts, love is important, pain is real. You have to find a way to dramatize that.”
“I understand,” he said. “Could you give me more clichés? Somehow that idea, what you’ve identified, I have a feeling it’s something Niles would have enjoyed thinking about.”
“It’s not just plot elements. It’s also language. Words that have been put together so many times, they’re as comfortable as an old bar of soap. ‘Dark as night.’ ‘Sky blue.’ ‘Wine-dark sea.’ ‘Raven-haired beauty.’ All those are familiar, so their meanings have eroded. They don’t carry any electricity. They remind you of a movie.”
“What about ‘Passion’s Golden Tresses’?”
“Perfect. Good God, where’d you get that?”
“It’s from an old magazine. Anyhow, I think I’m getting it.”
“Characters can be clichés too. Compare, say, Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe with Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert. Marlowe is incorruptible, smart, and brave, and he sees through everything, every motive, every feint, every lie. He’s too good to be true. Humbert, though he’s super-intelligent, makes every possible mistake, is in the grip of a pathetic obs
ession, can’t control his own behavior. Even when he shoots Quilty at the end, it’s not some terrific, highly choreographed gun battle but a pathetic transaction, where, shooting wildly, he runs after a begging, crying man. So Marlowe is the cliché, Humbert the authentic. Nabokov wouldn’t write about a cliché, except maybe to joke about it, to turn it on its nose, to make a game out of it.”
“I see,” said Bob. “Would Niles, after Nabokov, make a game of a cliché?”
“Well,” she said, “as you know, Nabokov loved games, so I suppose Niles had to pick up on that. He might have. His ‘code’ may involve a spirit of play. You know him better than I do.”
“Can you give me some other plot clichés? Nick of time was one, the hero never getting shot was another.”
“The most famous would be ‘The butler did it.’ That’s from a type of English crime novel in the twenties, when murder was considered an upper-class occurrence and the books were pure puzzle. The temptation of the butler was too delicious to resist: he was invisible, he was discreet, he was loyal, he knew the house and grounds perfectly.”
“There were a lot of books with a guilty butler, then?”
“Dozens. Hundreds. Then they reversed the cliché. Since everyone expected that the butler did it, it turned out the butler didn’t do it, even if he was the chief suspect. That became just as much of a cliché. But if you wanted to do that today, the real joke would be a game on the game. That is, the butler really did do it.”
“I see,” Swagger said.
“Here’s another one. It’s prevalent in a modern thriller: nothing is what it seems. The hero’s in a situation, and he continually interprets the signs for guidance. What he doesn’t know is that some evil genius has purposely constructed false signs to lead him astray. It never happens in real life, but it’s a great, if cheap, device. Most such books or movies dramatize the process by which the hero sees behind the manipulations and figures out what’s going on.”
“Got it. And if Nabokov, or even Niles Gardner, were to do a game on that, his version would make you think that nothing is as it seems, but actually—”
“—everything is exactly as it seems,” she said. “I see, by the light in your eyes, I might have scored a point.”
“Yes ma’am. I’m realizing that was the principle of the Red Nine. I thought it stood for something or labeled something or meant something else—say, a code name for an agent, a radio call sign, a chess move, something like that. In the end, it turned out to mean nothing else. It simply was what it was. He saw nine as red. He saw all nines as red, that’s all.”
“It was literal, not metaphorical. So it was the subtlest of codes, yes. The code was that there was no code. Who would ever figure that out except maybe a Bob Lee Swagger? No college professor would figure it out, because no college professor would be capable of thinking that clearly.”
“I’m thinking that maybe he used the same principle on the next step. Something seems like a code, but it’s not. It just is what it is, in plain sight, but you could look at it all day and not get that. The code is that there is no code. The secret is that there is no secret.”
“It’s too clever,” she said. “I could never use it in a book. Real life is never like that.”
It is all right to fail if you learn from your failure. Here is what I learned from the Moscow debacle. Swagger, at sixty-seven, was still very, very good. He could not be taken by run-of-the-mill criminal gunmen. He was too smart, too swift, too calm in action, too determined. Moscow had hardened him while confirming his suspicions, and he would move more directly to the target, which was, alas, me.
The second thing I learned (I have had to learn this lesson over and over again; maybe it will stick by the time I reach ninety!) is that you can’t rush things. They will happen at their own pace, at their own place in time. The more you rush, the more you cut corners, the more damage you do to yourself. I should have flown in my kill team at first notice and not tried to make do with a crew of uncertain talents and dubious motivations. To take professionals, you need to have professionals, so that issues of pride are involved, not just greed and the will to violence. My world-class killers wouldn’t have panicked, would have planned better, would have shot better, would have had more contingencies in play, would not have been thrown off their game when their sitting ducks proved to be armed.
The third thing I learned (I knew this too, but I forgot it also!) was to prepare the ground. Our team took Stronski at a place he, Stronski, knew best. He knew all the shooting angles, the paths through the bushes, the locations of the bench pedestals, which would stop incoming, and the trash cans, which would not.
I resolved to do better next time. For one thing, it would be the full focus of my attention. There would be no tending to empire and pleasure and turning to tactics in spare minutes between soirees. No, I had to go to war footing to win the war, which meant it had to be a 24/7 operation. I had to put aside my decadence and find my war brain again, and become the hard and ruthless Hugh of Clandestine Service, that old legend who’d killed a president and hundreds more in his time.
My first resolution was: take the fight to the enemy.
I knew I could not back off and let him find a new angle of attack to which I would react, because in the reaction would be encoded my failure. I was not going to live in anticipation of a move against me by this genius operator at the time and place of his choosing and pray for the luck of my guards. No, I had to go to him, I had to net him, I had to lure him to prepared ground where we knew the locations of the trees and benches and all the escape routes were predetermined, the sights zeroed, the weapons tested. It had to be done not just professionally but at the highest levels of professionalism.
I did have one advantage: I knew where he had to go. He had to go to Texas.
The only sure link to me was through the man who’d been his mentor in Dallas, and he suspected that man was an agent of mine. He’d have to reengage and infer from that a way to me. Who paid him, what were the arrangements, how did he report, how could he be played? He’d have to confront those questions.
In Texas I’d put something before him. Something so seductive, he could not resist its temptation. He would have to go after it; it would be his grail. He would study the approach, sniff a dozen times, seem to go, then back off. He’d circle around, he’d look for signs, for disturbances, for indicators of preparation and ambush, and I’d have to prepare carefully enough to survive that scrutiny. And finally—weeks down the long and winding path before me—he’d make his approach, and then we’d have him.
Since he was by nature a gunman, and since guns were in a way his Yoknapatawpha, I understood instinctively that he’d come at me through the guns. He would have no choice. They were what he knew, his terrain; he was the master navigator of that small world, and he would feel the most confidence in that arena. But there was more. I could feel it as if it were just beyond a screen or covered by a sheet, its outlines barely visible, no details yet to be seen. It had to do with guns. Guns were at the heart of it. Alek’s junky little war-surplus Italian clunker, Lon’s sleek, excellent Winchester, the whizz of the bullet to the target, the extraordinary damage such a small piece of matter could engineer within flesh if propelled at the proper speed and—
Then I had it. The breakthrough. Quite a moment, when it feels as if God is whispering in your ear. No, He is otherwise busy, I’m sure. The rapping at your chamber door is from your subconscious, which has been engaged with the issue full-time, trying facts against possibilities, seeing if parts fit or must be discarded, testing, testing, testing all the time until that moment when, miraculously, it all comes together in perfect, stunning clarity.
What I needed was a physical object, a file, a confession, something tangible and palpable, which would prove the existence of our plot against Kennedy. I needed something Swagger would kill to get and, at the same time, risk death to get. To make it real, I needed a plausible narrative to sustain it. I had to inven
t documents to validate it, I had to have unimpeachable witnesses to verify it, I needed a realistic chain of events that would account for its whereabouts since 1963 and that put it within Swagger’s reach today. This is what my imagination created in one gushing rush of fact and detail.
I came up with a gun case containing Hugh’s Model 70, the suppressor, and some of the hybrid .264/Carcano ammunition, locked and sealed with shipping tags proving it was shipped from Dallas to Richmond on the night of November 24, 1963, by Braniff. I imagined a backstory by which it was lost and then found by a writer doing a bio on Lon/John who would need the help of someone with practical ballistic experience. I imagined Richard bringing them together.
The one thing I could not imagine would be Swagger’s refusal.
I must say that, though they cost me a fortune, the Joneses turned out to be worth every pretty penny. The profusion of old documents they produced was amazing. It turned out that Mr. Jones was some sort of paper expert who knew about thread counts, finishes, manufacturing processes, the effects of aging, and all the minutiae of what I suppose could be called the paper game. His true expertise was chemical; using a variety of magic potions out of little brown bottles that produced vapors, he could give a routine sheet of papyrus the brittle yellowness of age so accurately that it was laboratory-proof as to time of origin.
That product was dispensed to various nimble professional criminal figures under contract to people who were under contract to various other people who were under contract to me, and in a bit of time we’d inserted a document in the necessary file, which appeared to be the files of the Madison Avenue seventh-floor gun room of Abercrombie & Fitch, a legendary place that shipped Lon most of the rifles he decided he couldn’t live without.
The Joneses had access to a whole range of criminal fabricators I had no idea even existed. They were able to hire a contractor who built an exquisite replica of a 1958 Abercrombie gun case and had it suitably aged; they came up with a Model 70 of the appropriate vintage, a Unertl scope, aged bottles of Hoppe’s gun oil, and an ancient .264 brass brush. No luck on the German Schalldaempfer, so they settled on an ancient Maxim silencer that at least was time-frame-appropriate. They used a noted arms expert to fabricate the cartridges, and he did so on brass of the proper historical pedigree, loaded on dies of the proper historical pedigree, and the bullets loaded into the shells were authentically from the rare lot 6003 of the Western Cartridge Co. 6.5 Mannlicher-Carcano white-box ammo. Don’t ask what it cost. I’d rather not know.