On the Run (9 page)

“Jesus, that’s a lot of money.”

“You get sent here to tell me
your
opinions? You bring me a message from somebody I’ll never know, and you take one back. That’s all. Take back my message. I just don’t want this one very much. I just don’t like the sound of this one. If he doesn’t show, I’ll settle for the down payment, which will be twenty-five hundred.”

“Twenty-five hundred for nothing?”

“You’re all mouth, boy. Here is a little piece of paper for you. Call the number on it at exactly eleven. I’ll say Jones and you say yes or no. If you say no, we both hang up. If you say yes, I’ll tell you where to bring the down payment.”

“All right. All right. Jesus! Like a spy deal.”

“Sonny, I’m alive. I’ve been in business twenty years. Now get out and shut the door.”

As the car door slammed, the man started the car and drove out of the lot. He turned on his lights as he turned into the stream of light traffic, too far away for the man to attempt to read his mud-smeared plates. He slipped the gun back under the retaining spring. He drove two miles. He stopped at another bar, ordered another ale, kept himself to himself, his face bland and closed, his big freckled hands at rest. The answer would be no. He was certain of that. And he had pegged the fee at the exact point where he could be indifferent as to whether the answer was yes or no, risk and profit balanced precisely. The minimum risk venture would be an unsuspecting victim in a big city with no stipulation to make it look like an accident. Poke the shotgun through the kitchen window and drop him between the sink and the stove. But there would be no contracts like that for a specialist. Crude labor could handle those at minimum fees. Ignorant expendables. One did not hire a hydraulics engineer to unstop a drain. Also, he could be contacted only through the highest level, and that, in itself, kept it limited to problems beyond regional disciplines.

At eleven, over a pay phone, the answer was yes, and he set up the contact in the same place, in the same manner as before, took the money, drove away. He would never know who had hired him, just as they would never know the day-by-day identity of the specialist they had hired. He would not know why this Shanley had to be taken. That was of no interest to him. It was an assignment. A contract, a problem requiring care and planning in the solution. The target was wary. It would require extreme care.

By the time Jones had driven back to his home in Troy, he had reverted to the habits of mind and the attitudes
of his everyday identity, wherein he was Eldon Bertold, proprietor and sole employee of the Harbor Stamp Company—Appraisals, approvals, cash for collections. He rented half of an old house in a defeated section of town, and lived alone there. There was a side-walk entrance to the tiny shop, a bell that jangled when anyone walked in, and a dusty confusion of stock books, albums, and all manner of philatelic supplies. Behind the shop were many rooms, and over the years each had become adapted to its own special purpose. Most of his stamp business was conducted by mail, and one room was the office where he prepared the approval cards and sheets for mailing to the list of customers he had developed over the years, kept his customer files, and typed his correspondence on the cheap buff letterhead. There was a sorting room with big tables where he made his appraisals and where he dismantled the collections he bought at auction or by direct purchase—throwing away the junk items, transferring the rest to his stock books or approval inventory and, very rarely, finding an item for his own private, specialized collection of United States Issues prior to 1900. He worked upon his own collection in another room, mounting there the prize-winning displays he took to conventions and exhibitions. The rare issues were in excellent safe-files, and on the walls were the framed photographs of special issues and special displays. A glass case held the awards he had received. There was another room, small, cluttered with equipment and lighting fixtures in which he took his superb macro-photographs and slides of rare issues, using bellows and clamps and special lenses on an old Hasselblad. Adjoining his photolab was his converted darkroom.

The kitchen, bedroom and bathroom were in the rear of the house. He had a few cheap clothes, a supply of simple foodstuffs. He put his car in the garage behind the house and went in through the kitchen. He went directly to the room containing the safe files, turned the combination dial on the heaviest one, opened the bottom drawer, removed a tin box from the rear of the drawer and placed it on the nearest table. Under the hooded lamp he counted the money that was in the box, counted what he had been given, put half of the advance
payment in the box and replaced it in the bottom drawer of the file.

With a feeling of impatience and excitement he sat down with a note pad and the catalogue of the public auction to be held during two days in August in the rooms of one of the better New York City auction houses. He had previously listed the items he was prepared to bid on, and the maximum bid he was prepared to make on each one. He was weak on the 1857 issues on cover, particularly the various shades of brown, red brown and orange brown on the five cent denomination. They were so rarely included in auctioned collections he had wished he had more money available for this one. Now he could expand his bid list and his alternate list.

He studied the catalogue description of one cover: “5ȼ Indian Red (28A). Tied Philadelphia pmk. on cover ‘pr. Arabia’ to Nova Scotia, 5 transit mark, back-stamped Boston Br. Pkt., Halifax Receiving Mark, Fine.” He looked at the catalogue photograph and wished he had the original print to study with a magnifying glass. Finally, with all value factors clear in his mind, he wrote the catalogue number and his maximum bid for that item, $215. He turned to the next page …

At two
A.M.
he suddenly realized he was hungry and was still wearing his hat, tie and suit jacket. And he realized that his desire to acquire the items at the auction in August was distracting him from the problem at hand.

He changed to an old bathrobe while the can of pork and beans was heating. The Shanley job, if the man appeared at all, would be delicate. Bolton was not a commuter town for a larger city. It was too far north of Syracuse. Strangers would be noticed and remembered. Conversely, you could expect the police work to be skimpy and clumsy.

When they wanted an object lesson, it was much easier. You come into town. You establish the movement pattern of the target. You fit yourself inconspicuously into some portion of that pattern, selecting the optimum time and place, and the best weapon of opportunity. Then, in a fractional part of a second, you earn your money and walk away from it. Method is of greatest importance.
The F.B.I. statistics show a running count of thirty-five murders a day. Eldon Bertold estimated that thirty-four of them were amateur, beneath contempt, crimes of passion and crimes caused by fright and crimes by people of unsound mind. Of the remaining three hundred plus each year, of the murders reported as murders rather than as accidents, possibly twenty to thirty were professional. The others were committed by amateurs with a certain amount of guile and talent. Of the professional kills that were reported, more than half were certainly at the hands of cheap blasters. And so, weeding it down to the small core of genuinely competent work, he estimated that the true professionals of the trade probably accounted for ten reported and ten unreported kills per year. Of these twenty annual victims, the majority were probably aware of danger—thus indicating the need for expert handling. Shanley was aware that it was not to be reported as murder. He counted back. This would be the sixth … no, the seventh accidental death he had arranged. They were easier in an urban environment. In Birmingham in 1953, it had been the easiest one of all. The man had tripped and fallen under the rear duals of a transit mix truck. In Miami in 1957 the man had walked out onto his private dock, boarded his cruiser and tried to start the engines without checking the bilges or starting the blower first. A careless habit, when there might be a quart of gasoline in the bilges creating a vapor as explosive as a sizable charge of dynamite. In Michigan in 1958, if the private plane hadn’t burned when it struck, they might have found the wad of waste that had gotten into the gas tank somehow. The easiest pattern in a mechanized society is through the machines for transportation. Man is frail at high speed.

As he went to sleep, he aligned all aspects of the problem in his mind, knowing that in this way, more often than not, he would awake with the beginnings of a plan of action. He tried not to think of the other items he could not make bids upon, and how well they would go with the 10ȼ greens, the 12ȼ blacks, and the superb 24ȼ lilac greys. He tried not to anticipate how it would be, going to the desk, paying the money in cash, walking out with the precious bundle. No other excitement in the world could match that.

It gave him a feeling of ironic satisfaction to realize that the killing had begun, actually, because of the stamps. And, to be fair about it, the fluency of his German had also been a factor. The German had been responsible for his being taken out of the line organization after basic training and ordered to Washington in 1942. After he had passed all their clearances and all their physical and psychological tests, and undergone all their highly specialized training, they had sent him to the unit based in London. Even then there would have been no killing, at least none on a specific assignment basis, had it not been for the stamps, for the alertness of the colonel in command in seeing how splendid a cover story could be fashioned of these materials. They provided him with a compact and valuable collection, gave him new identities and sets of forged papers, sent him in turn to four supposedly neutral countries as a young stamp dealer who had escaped from Germany and was trying to convert his valuable collection into gold or gems. In this way he made contact with those other imitation refugees who were in actuality key espionage and propaganda agents for the Reich. He was provided with special weapons, objects that looked innocent yet, when properly used, were incomparably deadly. During two years of undercover duty, he executed exactly one dozen, eleven men and one woman. In London they had told him it might disturb him to do this sort of work. One could never tell beforehand. One had to try it and see. He expected it would bother him.

But after the first one, in Barcelona, he knew he would be all right. The victim sipped the scalding coffee, lowered the cup carefully, stared at Bertold with an odd intensity, as though about to ask a question. Abruptly the eyes lost focus and the single spasm twisted the face out of shape. Then there was the unmistakable slackness, oddly like a still photograph of someone asleep.

He felt no pleasure, no concern, no regret. One less adult human animal in the world, and there seemed to be so many of them that the loss of one was infinitesimal. The business of the woman bothered him slightly. He dreamed about it once. And he remembered her after he had forgotten some who came later.

After the killing was over, he was sent to Germany,
on special duty with the military government, translating, interpreting security clearances. There he met Silvana. On the only night in his life he had ever gotten drunk, he told Silvana what he had done. Silvana said later he had talked quite a lot about the woman. Lieutenant Silvana did not talk about what he had done in civilian life. He was older than most lieutenants. Bertold understood that Silvana had been in city government somewhere in California. When Silvana had paid him an unexpected visit in Troy, New York, in 1946, Bertold’s mother was still alive. He was living with her in that same old rented house and trying to build up the stamp business. But he had begun to think he could never get enough return out of it. Silvana paid him five thousand dollars to go down to Mexico City and quietly kill a man named Kelly who, as an employee in charge of a smuggling operation, had developed a nasty habit of hijacking organization merchandise from time to time.

Bertold went to Mexico City, located Kelly and learned some of his habits. Then he bought an ice pick in one store and a file in another. The ice pick had a round wooden handle about the size of a golf ball. He cut the metal down to a two inch length and sharpened it. When he closed his fist around the ball, an inch and a half of metal stuck out between his second and third finger. He went to the bull fights on Sunday, in a loud shirt and a straw hat, with a cheap camera hung around his neck. When the last bull was killed, the crowds moved slowly, tightly packed, through the narrow cement tunnels. He moved in behind Kelly and his group. He was pressed against Kelly. In the darkest part of the fifty foot tunnel, masking his motion by making an awkward show of getting his camera strap off, he punched Kelly solidly, high in the nape of the neck, at the juncture of neck and skull. The compacted throng shuffled a dozen feet further while Kelly was slipping down. Bertold forced himself a little to one side. He began to hear the shouts behind him as others tripped on the body and were forced along and fell. Soon he was in the sunlight. He dropped the weapon down a storm drain. There was a small item in the English language newspaper the next day saying that an American resident named Kelly had died of a cerebral hemorrhage while leaving the bull ring. It said he had
been the local representative of an import-export firm with offices in St. Louis.

Now Silvana was dead too. And Bertold lived alone in the house. When Silvana had learned he was dying, he had set up another method of contact. Bertold’s business mail came to a post office box. He maintained a smaller box nearby under the name of K. Jones. He went to the post office every day. He always glanced into the other box. The only letters he ever found there were the ones, unsigned, which merely gave the date and time and identifications for someone to meet him and explain an assignment. Silvana had apparently made his stipulations clear. Careful contacts. Jobs one man could handle. Top rates, with a substantial down payment and the balance on completion. And, in the event anything ever did go wrong, there would be absolutely no way to trace the connection back through to the people who paid so well for the service. Once it had almost gone wrong. The woman had appeared at exactly the wrong moment, out there in Minneapolis, and she had given the police a very good description, so good that even with all the methods of travel he had used, they had traced him back to Troy. But there they had lost him. As they had no reason to assume he had stayed in Troy, he decided it was safe to stay. But he felt uneasy until, two years later, he saw a small wire service news item datelined Minneapolis, saying, “Eye witness to the Keogh murder, Hazel Vanichek, age 31, was fatally injured last night when struck by a stray bullet during an attempted holdup of the Plantation Club where she had been employed for the past year as a hat check girl. The holdup man, Richard Paris, age 19, was taken into custody in the parking lot of the club after having been felled by a bullet in the left leg fired by Detective Lucas Cammer of the City Police, who was in the club at the time of the holdup attempt. The Vanichek woman, struck in the chest by the 38 caliber bullet, was pronounced dead on arrival at City Memorial Hospital. Paris, running from the club, turned and fired in the direction of Lieutenant Cammer who was in pursuit of him. Hazel Vanichek will be remembered as the eye-witness to the shooting of Abner Keogh on June 20th, 1951, at his hunting lodge on Rum River near Mille Lacs Lake, shortly before Keogh was to
be recalled to give additional testimony before the Grand Jury in connection with a gambling probe. She was held in protective custody as a material witness for over seven months following the shooting, and was released when all leads to the possible identity of the killer were exhausted.”