Hopscotch (7 page)

“Myerson would like nothing better.”

“Hell, Miles, we've already arranged to sell your body to science. But you can still call it off.”

“No point in that. You people need me like the axe needs the turkey. If I stopped writing now it wouldn't change that.”

“You really want this fox hunt, don't you.”

“It's a way to pass the time.”

“Want to know what I think, Miles?”

“Avidly.”

“I think you've picked this game because it's impossible. You'll have plenty of excuses for your failure. It's a hell of a cheap shot.”

“You're talking into a dead phone, Joe. I'll see you sometime.”

Click
.

Ross leaned back. “Of all the—”

“Shut up.” Cutter was jiggling the phone cradle; then he put the instrument back to his mouth. “This is extension seven six two. A call just came in on this line. I want the log on it.”

Ross stood up and went back to his chair. The ashtray beside it was crowded with butts. They'd been waiting three days and every time he'd made a suggestion about taking some action or other Cutter had told him to go ahead if it would make him feel better. Cutter just sat by the phone and waited. It made Ross feel like an ass. He knew how Cutter regarded him: for Cutter people seemed to have glass heads. To Cutter he was a tall excitable kid, an overgrown precocious schoolboy. And the power of Cutter's personality was such that he'd half convinced Ross he was right in his judgment. Ross was
a six-year veteran of the Agency and Cutter was making him feel like a green recruit.

Cutter grunted into the phone and hung it up. He swiveled on the corner of the desk and said, “The son of a bitch.”

“What?”

“It was a local call,” Cutter said. “The son of a bitch is right here in Langley.”

“He must have the balls of a brass gorilla,” Ross said.

“There never was anybody like him.”

“No way to trace that call, is there. Well it's not such a big town. Shouldn't we scout around and see if we can spot him?”

“He'll be halfway to the West Virginia line by now.”

“Then what the hell do you have in mind? Sit on our asses and diddle ourselves until he calls back?”

“He won't call back,” Cutter said. “He's said everything he had to say.”

“He didn't say much of anything.”

“He's waving a red flag, that's all. All right, it's time we got started.”

“Doing what?”

“Collect the composites from the second floor. Get us a conference room for eleven-thirty. And organize some transportation.” Cutter had the phone again. “It's Cutter,” he said into it, and covered the mouthpiece to talk to Ross again: “I'll be with Myerson. You chair the conference. You'll have twelve men. Take them into town and blanket the pay phones. Take the composites. Find out where he made the call from, what he was wearing, what
kind of car he's driving, which way he went when he left.”

“You think we'll find anybody who noticed?”

“Probably not. But we've got to cover it.”

Ross started gathering things together and putting them into his briefcase. Cutter had gone back to the phone:

“Kendig's here somewhere. In Langley. I'll want a few more men on it.… Nuts, he's priority enough. He's mailed a second chapter out to those publishers. He's going to keep mailing chapters out until we get him. How long do you want it to take? … No. He says he wants revenge because he got canned but that's not it. He's like a bicycle, when it stops moving it falls down. He's rolling again, that's all. There's no point to it beyond the movement itself. As long as he keeps rolling he stays upright, you follow? … Hell I'm not wasting your time. You
asked
me. Now he's got to be traveling on phony papers. I'm going to need authority to call on some of the overseas stringers. We'll have to canvas the dealers. He must have bought papers from somebody, probably before he left Europe.…”

Cutter was still arguing with Myerson on the phone when Ross went out into the corridor.

– 6 –

H
E DIDN
'
T USE
the superhighways. There wasn't any terrible rush and it was remotely possible they'd play the odds and cover the toll roads like the New Jersey Turnpike. The volume and concentration of traffic on those arteries was such that they might feel justified in using up manpower on stakeouts there. So he drove the old forgotten highways around the western suburbs of Philadelphia, up through New Hope and Lumberville, up the truck across the Delaware through Stockton and Flemington and Somerville, route U.S. 22 to Newark Airport. There as James Butler he turned in the rental car to the car agency. Then he took an airport bus into the West Side terminal in Manhattan.

A hunt built its own momentum. Later on they'd be close behind him with their noses to the ground and there wouldn't be time to sit down and write. The thing to do was to write the whole thing and carry it along with him and post the chapters one at a time; he'd let Cutter's actions dictate the intervals between mailings.

But it meant he had to go to ground for a period of weeks. The book didn't have to be very long but certain things had to be covered in detail; he didn't want to leave them room to squirm out of anything. It had taken him five days to rough out the chapter
and another four days to polish it until it satisfied him; the second chapter had taken a bit longer than that. Probably the whole book would run about two hundred pages of typescript, of which he'd already written thirty-five; if he could do forty a week he'd have it finished in four more weeks. That meant hard steady work but it could be done; he wasn't trying for any literary prizes.

The limit would be self-imposed because they weren't going to go away no matter how long he took; but if he wasted too much time on it there was a danger he'd relapse and maybe not finish writing it at all. He had to keep the tension on. So he set himself a thirty-day limit. It would be just about the right length of time to get Cutter into hot water too.

But before he went to ground he'd have to lay a false trail—something to keep them occupied and leave them looking silly.

Number 748 Third Avenue was a steel-and-glass office tower that had been architected in evident imitation of a sheet of graph paper: as functional as a bayonet and just as warm. He consulted the building directory in the lobby and found
IVES, JOHN H., LITERARY AGENCY
—3302. He found the proper bank of elevators and touched his thumb to the depressed plastic square; it lit up in response to the heat of his skin and he twisted his thumb slightly, out of habit.

Muzak and two delivery boys accompanied him to the thirty-third floor and he found his way to Ives's door. A chic receptionist asked him to wait; he sat while the girl talked into an interphone. The
desk and shelves were cluttered with an awful mess and the floor was a jumble of opened cartons of books.

A man came through the door. “Mr. Butler? I'm Jack Ives. Come into the office.”

Ives was younger than he'd expected—very tall, glasses, beard, wavy brown hair cut and shaped by someone expensive. He didn't exactly look distinguished; he looked like a character-actor who specialized in playing distinguished roles, but he was too young for the part and his eyes were too bright and crafty.

The office was as littered as the anteroom. It had the studied elegant decor of a nineteenth-century gentleman's library but the frantic disorder dispelled that. Ives shut a door behind Kendig and waved him to a chair. “I don't ordinarily talk speculative books with unknown writers. But I've checked with Desrosiers and he tells me I'd better listen to you. Your name's not Butler, is it.”

“Kendig. Miles Kendig.”

Ives squinted as if trying to place the name.

“You've never heard it before. I'm a retired employee of a government agency. My last position there was Deputy Director of the Plans Division.”

“You don't look the type.”

“Which type?”

“E. Howard Hunt, that type.”

“That's another breed. Those are the downstairs troops.”

“Go on, Mr.… Kending?”

“Kendig.”

Ives reached for a notepad. “Spell it.”

Kendig spelled it out. “The government will deny
my existence. If you were thinking of checking with Washington.”

“It won't be necessary. I've already got Desrosiers's recommendation. Let's talk business, Mr. Kendig.”

Ives was a fast reader. He went through the two chapters and Kendig handed him an unfolded list. “Those are the publishers I've sent it to.”

Ives glanced at it, set it aside and went back to the manuscript. “There are a couple of pages missing.”

“They'll be supplied later on. Names of witnesses, documentary sources for confirmation of my facts, that kind of thing.”

Ives had a shrewd smile. “Not to put too fine a point on it but have we got any way to make sure you're not bluffing?”

Kendig had pages 23 and 24 folded into an envelope in his pocket. He showed them to Ives. Ives's face changed. Then Kendig took the two pages back and put them away. “They'll be delivered with the final installment of the manuscript.”

“And you want me to handle the contractual details.”

“I need a middleman. I've got to finish writing it—undisturbed.”

“I think I understand. Why'd you pick me?”

“Desrosiers recommended you. You handled the Harry Bristow book.”

“Are you putting a floor price on it?”

“I'll take whatever the market will bear.”

“Then it's not primarily a money thing with you.”

“I won't be a patsy—I'm not giving it away.”

“Do you need money right now?”

“I've got plenty of money. But I want them to have to pay for the book—I don't want it neglected for lack of big promotion.”

Ives smiled again. “Don't count on publishers to act logically. I've seen them pay a fortune for a book and then drop it right down the gratings. They're in a mass business but they do no market research, they never test their packaging, they only advertise a book if it's already selling well—and even then they haven't the slightest idea how or where to get the most for their advertising dollar. They've got an archaic distribution system and haphazard retailing. Actually they have no idea at all what sells books and what doesn't. But this property looks as sure-fire to me as anything I've seen in the past five years. It could be the most explosive book of the year—and you've already done the groundwork with the publishers. I'd be an idiot not to handle it for you.”

“It won't be the usual agent-client relationship.”

“There's no such thing. Every client is a separate lunacy.”

“I'll give you a power of attorney,” Kendig said. “You'll have to conclude the arrangements in my name. You won't be able to communicate with me. I'll be sending copies of each chapter to each of those publishers at irregular intervals—and I'll be withholding evidential pages from each of them. It may be months before I've delivered the complete book.”

“You could send it directly to me. I've got copying facilities.”

“No. That would give the Agency a bottleneck to
work with. I've got to be sure the material reaches every one of the publishers.”

“Very well—if you feel the risk is that great. But send me a copy when you send it to the rest of them.”

“Naturally.”

“There'll probably be a matter of libel insurance. With a book of this kind the premiums may prove costly.”

“The publishers will have to pay for that.”

“I'll arrange that if I can.”

Kendig said, “What's the usual procedure for paying commissions?”

“I take ten percent of the client's gross receipts off the top. When I receive a check from a publisher I deposit the check in my corporate account and draw my own check for ninety percent of that amount, payable to the client. Naturally the client is welcome to examine my accounts at all times. There's no written contract between me and any of my clients—it's a handshake arrangement. When a client's dissatisfied with my work he's free to go elsewhere.”

Ives continued, “In your case since you say I won't be able to reach you the thing would be for me to open an account for you and make deposits as the money comes in.”

“No good,” Kendig said. “A bank account can be frozen by court order. I'll want cashier's checks, made out in my name, sent by airmail to this address in Switzerland.” He wrote it down and tore the page out of his pocket notebook and tossed it onto the desk. Ives picked it up curiously.

Kendig said, “People from the government will be around to see you before very long.”

Ives' grin made him even younger. “They won't learn anything from me. Not without a warrant.”

“They won't use warrants. They don't work that way. You'd find yourself up to your ears in income tax audits. Your driver's license would be mysteriously revoked. Your credit rating would evaporate overnight. Maybe you'd find that certain publishers were no longer buying anything from you. You'd start to lose clients—they'd give some vague excuse for shifting to another agency. Your wife would find her charge accounts canceled. Your kids would be caught with narcotics planted in their pockets. I could give you a list of subtle persuasions ten pages long.”

Ives's manicured index finger touched the piece of notepaper. “Then you want me to reveal this to them?”

“It won't do either of us any harm.”

“But they'll trace the address.”

“They already know it. Those are my brokers in Zurich. One of them has my power of attorney to make deposits in my bank. He doesn't have the account number. He takes the check and the power of attorney to the bank. The bank deposits the check in my numbered account without giving the number to the broker. It's a dead end for the Agency. He can't lead them to me. Neither can you. Just cooperate with them when they approach you.”