The Buck Passes Flynn (13 page)

“Oh, shut up, Francis.”

“—a girl young enough to be of more interest to my sons than the ordinary football—”

“How old are you anyway, Flynn?”

“I’m pushin’ forty,” said Flynn. “From the north side.”

“Oh, come on.” Beginning to unpack him, she loosened his necktie. “You can’t tell me you have no more interest in me than in a football.”

“Well,” said Flynn. “You’re about the same color.”

She put his hand on her hip. “A little smoother, wouldn’t you say?”

“Aye, that. But I have the suspicion your bounce is just as tricky.”

She put her hand behind her neck and turned slowly in the air. There were mirrors everywhere in the room, and Ducey was in each.

“Not the same shape at all, Flynn.”

“I admit: you’re something I hate to pass.…”

From the distance of two meters her eyes locked on his. “But you’re going to, aren’t you, Flynn? Instead of making love with me, you’re going to make jokes?”

He gulped. “I am.”

“What’s in your head, Flynn?”

“Suspicions. Wee voices of warning in the back of the cranium.”

“Of what, for God’s sake?”

“You have to admit, Ms. Webb, your approach has been odd.”

“Odd?” She wrinkled her face at him.

“Marked by a combination of the ingenuous and the disingenuous.”

“What?”

“The direct and the indirect.”

“I understand English.” She shook her head. “No one understands the Irish.”

“You followed me in a yellow Fiat convertible from Austin, Texas. Yet after following me awhile, you suddenly turn off down a dirt road. You could have
caught up to me—that is, if it was your purpose to work with me.”

The skin over her cheekbones darkened. “I wanted to change clothes. Into something cooler.”

“You raised a lot of dust and wasted considerable gasoline giving vent to your modesty.”

“There’s a difference between the eyes of Texas and smiling, Irish eyes.”

“Is there? I’d say it’s more likely that at that point of the trip you were able to confirm I was definitely headed for Ada, Texas.”

“Confirm to whom? How?”

“Next you pop into Bob’s Diner with two extraordinary things. The first was a letter of introduction handwritten by the President of the United States, no less, unsigned, as if it were from the bowers of the imperial bedchamber.”

“Have you checked its authenticity?”

“No.”

She placed her hand on her hip.

“The second wondrous thing you brought to our meeting at Bob’s Diner is woolly speculation regarding Ada itself: that there could be vast quantities of oil underneath; that the town could be schemed for a radioactive-materials dump.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“With your own apparent resources you could have checked out both elements in the time it takes a wee lamb to give the world a steady gaze and say, ‘Baa!’ ”

She sat in the chair.

“Next you pop up in my bed in Las Vegas, my investigation in East Frampton, and now, very much in my view, here in Washington.”

She fitted a toe against the faded pattern of the rug.

“I’m just trying to help.”

“I’ll repeat, in my own way: your help seems both oddly personal and oddly distracting.”

“Well… we’re traveling together.”

“We are not traveling together.”

“Flynn. I know something of your background. I know you must lead a guarded life. I know you have to be suspicious of everyone and everything, just to survive. But tell me, you big lummox: with all this darting around under bushes you’ve had to do, when was the last time anyone told you you are a beautiful, gorgeous man?”

“The last time someone wanted something from me. I can’t figure what you want, Ms. Webb. For the life of me I can’t.”

“The married Flynn,” she scoffed. “‘Reluctant’ Flynn. I told you what I want.” She gestured at her own body. “I’m concealing nothing!”

He was putting things back into his suitcase.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Home to Mother,” he muttered.

She rose and put her arms around his neck and nuzzled his earlobe. “Flynn…”

“Ulysses and sirens!” exclaimed Flynn, disentangling himself. “A job’s a job, for a’ that. Don’t you know I never mix pleasure with pleasure?”

She threw herself on the bed.

“I guess I’m insulted.”

Flynn said, “I haven’t the experience to know.”

“Anyway,” she said. “There’s a message for you.”

“Ach! Now we get to my business part of the business.”

“A man named Sankey called. Paul Sankey. Federal Reserve Bank. Special Section. Said he’ll see you at nine-thirty in the morning.”

“Sankey,” said Flynn.

“You’re welcome,” she drawled.

Ducey Webb rolled onto her side and, arm akimbo, put her head on her free hand.

“Flynn.”

He snapped his suitcase shut.

“What did you learn in East Frampton?”

“Ah, there’s the point,” said Flynn. “You either
want my money, or what I know—and I haven’t any money.”

He headed for the door. “Good night to you.”

“Flynn?”

Lying on the bed as she was, Ducey Webb may have been the most beautiful thing Flynn had ever seen.

She said, “I’m wet for you.”

Flynn said, “Aw, dry up.”

Again Flynn stood at the hotel’s reception desk, suitcase in hand.

He said, rather more loudly than usual: “I’d like to check in for the night.”

The desk clerk said, “Oh, no! Not again…”

ACCORDING to Flynn, the city planners of Washington, D.C., were so proud of their work they weighted the entire area down with outsized architectural lumps so the city would not blow away in the winds of political fortune.

It was twenty to ten the next morning before Flynn found the right architectural lump, and five to ten before he found the Special Section, headed by Paul Sankey, within the lump, and ten past ten before Sankey had extricated himself from his staff, vaults, offices, corridors, and other machinery within the lump to join Flynn in a small lounge furnished in metal and plastic. Flynn ordered coffee and rolls for two.

Paul Sankey was a short, slim man with intense, dark eyes.

His greeting was a perfunctory nod.

He sat across the small metal table from Flynn, tipped back his chair, and crossed his arms across his chest He ignored the coffee and roll set out before him.

Sankey said, “Eighteen years ago you and I were
together at a rather key money conference at The Hague.”

“That long ago?” encouraged Flynn.

“You were young,” Sankey said, “to be doing whatever you were doing. How old were you eighteen years ago?”

“Eighteen years ago? Twenty-two or twenty-three.”

In fact, at that time Flynn had been so impressed by the astuteness of Paul Sankey that he considered recommending him to N.N. Ultimately he decided against it. He believed Sankey old enough to have lost the mental flexibility he would need to begin with a “between-the-borders” operation such as N.N. Eighteen years before, Sankey had been thirty-three.

Sankey said, “I never figured out what it was you were doing there. I was never sure. I’m still not sure.”

“I was a guileless babe in arms,” Flynn said.

“Guileless? That I’ve never thought. One thing I’ve always been sure of: somehow or other you used me.”

“Used you?”

“I was manipulated somehow or other.”

“Now how could that be?”

“A charming, handsome, witty young man who somehow or other got himself in and out of rooms—meetings, receptions, dinners—without ever appearing to be there, delaying someone’s arrival, hastening someone’s departure, putting a word in an ear here and disrupting a conversation there. You were something to watch.”

“And why would you be watching me so closely?”

“Because you were young and everyone was sure you represented something significant. But no one knew what I still don’t know who or what you represented.”

“Ach, sure,” said Flynn. “I’m just a flatfoot at heart.”

“A what?”

“A flatfoot.”

Sankey’s eyes swelled before looking away.

“Rightly or wrongly,” Sankey said, slowly, “I have
always attributed two sentences of our ambassador’s speech to you. Two key sentences. Two sentences that were not written by either him or his staff. Two sentences that he didn’t know were in the speech, even as he read them. Two sentences that I have always believed you inserted in that speech somehow, the first of which was particularly significant to the world.”

“Sure, now—”

“The two sentences were: The European Common Market will never attain an economic force equal to that of the United States of America. It is in full cognizance of this that the United States of America asures European Common Market nations of the full support of the United States of America.’ ”

Sankey looked accusingly at Flynn.

“Ach, well,” said Flynn.

“Flynn, that statement, at that time, did more to put the whole world on the dollar standard than any other single event or statement.”

“And that’s bad?”

“It’s ruined the economy of the world.”

“I assure you I’m innocent,” Flynn said, “of all the best and the worst you think of me.”

“You’re trying to convince me you don’t understand?”

“If you can’t believe in my innocence,” said Flynn, “then believe in my ignorance. I have no idea what you’re blatherin’ about, man.”

Sankey stared at him, shook his head. “You’re very convincing, Flynn. You always were.”

“I should be—especially when I’m tellin’ the truth.”

Finally Sankey smiled. “Why are you here now, Flynn?”

“A simple matter. I doubt I need the attentions of such an august personage as yourself.”

“I wanted to see you anyway … when I heard you made a request to come in…. I wanted to …” Sankey looked off into a corner of the room, as if unable
to remember what he was saying, “to see you again.”

“Now that you’ve had the rare privilege of seem’ me,” said Flynn, “may I ask what the Special Section of the Federal Reserve does? I’m always eager to expand my befuddlement.”

Sankey glanced at him quickly and then answered as if by rote. “We’ve been setting up new systems to conduct the flow of money.”

“Oh,” said Flynn. “Well, that befuddles me.”

To Flynn it did not seem like that much of a job for a man who had been trusted by his government at a major money conference at The Hague eighteen years before, at the age of thirty-three.

Then Flynn remembered that he himself was now mainly employed as a Boston policeman, and he had been at that same conference at the age of twenty-two.

Flynn said, “Isn’t current social mobility a wonder to behold?”

He took three bills from his pocket—a twenty-, a fifty-, and a hundred-dollar bill—and handed them to Paul Sankey.

“I would like to have the highest authority in the land assure me of the authenticity of these little darlings. There’s a wee suspicion abroad they’re not the legitimate children of Mama Treasury and Papa Justice.”

Holding the bills in his hand, Sankey looked disappointed. “You mean, are they counterfeit?”

“That’s the question.”

Sankey sniffed them, and looked at them again, closely. “They look all right to me, but I’ll have them tested.” Finally, he smiled. “I just remembered you and I having a dinner together at The Hague. Whatever it was we ordered, all we got was heaps of sauerkraut.” He put the bills in his shirt pocket. “What’s this about, Flynn?”

“What’s what about?”

“You didn’t need to come directly to Special Section to have a few bills tested for authenticity.”

“Ach, well,” Flynn said. “That. I had to come to Washington anyway. There are some people I need to see at the Pentagon this afternoon.”

“No,” Sankey said. “I learned my lesson with you eighteen years ago. You’re not worrying about one hundred and seventy dollars in counterfeit money.”

“Aren’t I?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Flynn rose. Neither of them had touched his coffee or roll. “It’s a mysterious matter.”

Sankey said, “I expect so.”

“Great sums of money have been turning up in odd places.”

“ ‘Great sums’?”

“Over four hundred million dollars.”

Sankey stood up. He headed tiredly toward the door. “I’ll have these bills checked out for you, Flynn. Where can I reach you?”

“Hotel Dorland. I hope to be there only until tomorrow morning.”

“All right.”

“Please leave the message for me at the desk. There seems to be some confusion as to which room I’m in.”

“Oh? How can there be?”

“Exactly.”

Sankey opened the door for Flynn. “One day I wouldn’t mind understanding you, Flynn. Or having you understand me.”

“Sure,” Flynn said. “Frequently I feel the same way myself.”

“I HAVE been over this ground a dozen times, Mister Flynn.”

There was no fat on the body of Major William Calder.

Flynn had found the major finishing a heavy workout in a gymnasium of the Pentagon, and accepted his invitation to join him in the sauna.

They were alone.

Flynn smiled. “Surely a military man like yourself is used to doing things in triplicate.”

Calder’s look could be read as that of the usual military sentry: no one is permitted to get under the skin of the military, except military personnel.

“I’ve been ordered to answer your questions, Mister Flynn. I’ll answer them. I’m just saying I’m sick and angry over this whole ball of wax.”

“Why is that?”

The major looked as if he had just been ordered to eat a bowl of live garden snakes for national security reasons.

“We were a good outfit. A good team. Blown all to hell and back.”

“You mean United States Air Force Intelligence Section 11B.”

Flynn’s specific identification of the department caused the major to wince before he admitted, “Yeah.”

Flynn had observed that all American military departments—especially the Intelligence sections—thought it was they and only they who had the world on a string. None did.

“We were doing good work,” added the major.

“What specifically were you doing at that point in time?”