The Third Bullet (58 page)

“Jean, it’s Bob Swagger.”

“Oh, you!” she said. “I’m so happy to hear from you. I thought you’d disappeared.”

“I can be hard to find at times. My old crank’s suspicion.”

He was calling from his cell in the arrival terminal at Baltimore/Washington International. Vacation in Baltimore? In the real world, it’s been known to happen, but in this case, he was on duty, as it were. It wasn’t exactly Marquez he wanted to see; nor did he want to rent her inherited tommy gun—yet. He had another purpose.

“I heard about some Russian driver-murderer killed in Dallas,” she said. “I know I can’t ask you questions, but—”

“That was part of the deal. He was the wheel man. He tried his trick on somebody who was waiting for him. It was part of an FBI sting.”

“You—”

“I had a little to do with it. But the job ain’t finished. Have you got time to talk?”

“I’m a newspaper reporter. I chat, that’s what I do. Go ahead.”

“Ah, this is sort of hard to explain, but some evidence has come up that suggests a puzzle of some sort, many years old, might be involved and has to be solved. I know, it sounds goofy. It is goofy. But that’s how they worked back then.”

“I’m listening.”

“Did your husband ever make a connection to the Russian writer Vladimir Nabokov?”

“I must say, the last two words I ever expected to come from your mouth are ‘Vladimir’ and ‘Nabokov.’”

“They were the last two words I ever expected to say, believe me.”

“The answer would be no. Jimmy’s literary period was long past. He read about guns and he read history and politics. I don’t think I ever saw him read a novel.”

“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 obsession, 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.