"Balance of Power" - читать интересную книгу автора (Murphy Warren)

Chapter One

It was a white neighborhood with clean, tree-lined streets and mowed lawns, free of garbage and noise and scrambling bodies. Halfway down Ophelia Street, a three-story wooden house winked through drawn blinds across the silent Hudson to New York City, squatting like a giant, crouching gray animal.

It was a nice house in a nice place, a place where a man would want to live. That is, if there were anything to live for in that house, such as a drop of tequila. Or even bourbon. Gin, in a pinch. Anything.

But for seventy-five thousand dollars, a man had a right to sleep peacefully through the night in his own house, without being shattered into consciousness by a doorbell so diabolically designed as to sound like the squawks of a thousand migrating ducks.

He refused to open his eyes. If he should catch a glimmer of light, it would destroy his sleep and then the squawking would never go away and then he would be awake.

A man had a right to sleep if he paid for his own home. He covered an ear with a palm and curled his legs up toward his chin, hoping that assuming the fetal position would catapult him back to the womb, where there were no ducks.

It didn't. The doorbell continued ringing.

Bernard C. Daniels opened his eyes, brushed some of the dust from his white summer tuxedo and contemplated swallowing. The taste in his mouth told him it was a bad idea.

He pushed himself off the wooden floor that had once seen many coats of polish, but was now covered thickly from wall to wall with a gray film of dust. Only his resting place and last night's footprints broke the film. It was a barren room with a high white ceiling and old unused gas vents for lighting the house during a past era. It was his room, in the United States of America, where there were laws, in the town of Weehawken, New Jersey, where he was born and where no one crept up on you in the middle of the night with a machete. It was a place where you could close your eyes.

He was fifty years old and closing his eyes was a luxury.

His first night of luxury in many years shattered by a doorbell. He would have to get it disconnected.

Daniels stumbled to the window and tried to open it. Age had sealed it more securely than any latch.

He needed a drink. Where was the bottle?

He traced last night's steps from the door to his resting place to the window. No bottle.

Where was it? He couldn't have put it in the large closet at the other end of the room. There was no arcing sweep in the dust on the floor at the base of the closet doors. Where the hell was it?

Squawk. Squawk. Squawk. The bell sounded again. Daniels muttered a curse and broke a pane in the window with the empty bottle he had in his pocket.

So that's where it was. He smiled. A cool April breeze off the Hudson River flowed through the broken window. Daniels filled his lungs with the cool, fresh air, then gagged and sputtered. He would have to tape over the window, he said to himself, coughing. Too much air, and a man could breathe himself to death. He'd been so much more comfortable breathing the homey dust of the floor.

A sharp voice came from beneath the window. "Daniels!" the voice yelled. "Daniels, is that you?"

"No," Daniels quavered back, his voice hurdling over a lake of rancid phlegm. At first he hadn't known whether to answer in Spanish or English. Fortunately, he realized, "no" was the same in both languages.

The bottle was wet in his perspiring hands. He glanced at the label. Jose Macho's Four Star Tequila. He could get a gallon for a buck in Mexico City. It had cost him nine dollars at a Weehawken bar.

Squawk. Squawk. Squawk.

"Damn it," Daniels hollered through the shattered pane. "Will you stop that goddamn ringing!" "

"I did," came the voice. It was familiar. Coldly, efficiently, disgustingly familiar.

''Wo estoy aqui," Daniels answered.

"What do you mean you're not home? What other idiot would smash a window instead of answering a doorbell?"

Succumbing to logic, Daniels dropped the bottle on the floor and left the room, the squawks still sounding in his ears. He descended the wooden stairs, slowly pausing to examine all three dusty barren floors.

He walked with grace, each step the product of years of gymnastics, built into a solid muscular body that 35 years of frequent abuse had not managed to debilitate. Daniels was a handsome man. He knew this because women told him so. His rugged face was topped by a shock of short, steel-gray wavy hair. His nose had been broken six times, and the last fracture restored the dignity that the first five had taken away.

A cruel face, women called it. Sometimes the perceptive ones added, "But it fits you, you bastard."

Barney would have smiled remembering that, if he hadn't been seeking desperately to burn out the barnyard-flavored coating of his tongue with a blast of alcohol. Any decent rotgut would do. But there was nothing.

Squawk. Squawk. He waved his arm in the oak-paneled foyer as though the man behind the stained glass window could see his movements and would stop ringing. No good. He fumbled with the three brass locks on the door, finally twisting the last into position.

Then, firmly grasping the tarnished doorknob as if it would fall to the floor if he let go, he pulled back hard and a gust of April swatted his face. "Ooh," Barney gasped.

A man in a stylish Ivy League blue worsted suit stood in the doorway. He wore an immaculate white shirt and a striped tie, knotted tightly, and carried a black attache case. He had the kind of well-bred, old-money face that was accepted everywhere and forgotten immediately. Barney would have forgotten it too, except that he'd seen its smug, vain, monotonously snotty expression too many times.

"Quit ringing the frigging doorbell," Daniels demanded, refusing to let the wind blow him to the floor and amazed, as ever, that its force failed to muss the man's careful Christopher Lee hairdo.

"My hands are at my sides," the man said without humor.

Daniels stared into the wind. They were.

Squawk. Squawk.

He needed a drink.

"You wouldn't happen to have a drink on you, would you, Max?"

"No," said Max Snodgrass emphatically. "May I come in?"

"No," said Barney Daniels just as emphatically and slammed the door in Max Snodgrass's face. Then, watching the dark shadow on the other side of the stained glass, he waited for the outrage.

"Open this door, Daniels. I have your first pension check. If you don't open up you won't get your check."

Barney shrugged and tilted his head back, looking at the solid beamed ceilings fifteen feet high. They didn't build them like that any more. It was a fine buy.

"Open up now or I'm leaving."

And the paneling, thick oak. Who paneled with oak nowadays?

"I'm leaving."

Barney waved goodbye. And the ceiling joints.

"I'm serious. I'm leaving."

Daniels opened the door again. "Don't leave," he said softly. "I need your help."

Max Snodgrass stepped back slightly, a wary half step. "Yes?"

"An old woman is dying upstairs."

''I'll call a doctor."

Daniels raised a shaking hand. "No. No. It's too late for that."

"How do you know? You're not a doctor."

"I've seen enough death to know, Max," he intoned somberly. "I smell death."

Daniels could see the pink neck stretching, the flat gray eyes trying to peer into the house. "And you want me to do something for her, is that right?"

Daniels nodded.

"And I'm the only man in the world who can help, is that right? And it's not a loan of a few dollars because I have the check with me, right? Then it must be something else. Could it be she wants one last glass of tequila for her dry old throat before she passes on to that great desert up yonder?"

Snodgrass smiled, an evil, vicious, untrusting smile. The smile of a man who would not give a dying grandmother a drink.

"You have no heart," Daniels said. "From a man who has no heart, I will not accept the check."

"You're not doing me any favors."

"Yes I am, buddy. If I don't take the check, your bookkeeping will get all fouled up." He grinned wickedly. "And we both know what your boss will think about that."

Your boss. Not ours. Thank God.

"Ridiculous," Snodgrass said in a casual voice that suddenly squeaked. "Just add another memo to the files."

"But the CIA doesn't cotton to memos," Daniels taunted.

The pink neck grew red and the gray eyes above it flashed. "Quiet," Snodgrass hissed. "Will you shut up?"

"I'll say it louder," Daniels-said. "Louder and louder. CIA. CIA. CIA."

Snodgrass, glanced quickly and desperately to both sides. He slapped the oak panel of the door with the flat of his hand. "All right, all right, all right. Will you shut up? Shhhh."

"Mickey's Pub will sell it to you, and it's only three blocks away. The liquor store's six and a half blocks," Daniels said helpfully.

"I'm sure you've counted the steps," Snodgrass sneered as he turned to go.

"Don't forget to bring two glasses and a lemon."

"First take the check."

"No."

"All right. I'll be back. And shut up." Snodgrass pranced neatly down the steps to the cracked path that led to his well-polished Ford.

Squawk. Squawk. Squawk. The ducks started flying through his head again. Damn it, when would Snodgrass get back?

Snodgrass didn't knock. He walked through the open door to the kitchen where Daniels sat on the sink desperately desiring a cigarette.

"Got a smoke?"

"One thing at a time," Snodgrass said, opening his attache case and extracting the tequila bottle.

He offered the bottle as if throwing out a challenge. Daniels accepted it as if accepting a gift from the altar of grace.

"No glasses?" Daniels asked.

"No."

"How can you expect a man to drink in his own private home straight from the bottle?" Daniels asked, twisting off the cap and dropping it into the white porcelain sink. "What are you, Snodgrass? Some kind of animal that never lived in a house? Where were you brought up, some South American jungle or something?"

Indignantly, Barney Daniels raised the bottle to his lips and let the clear, fiery liquid pour into his mouth and singe it clean. He swished the tequila in his mouth, careful that it washed over each tooth and numbed the gums. Then he spat it over his right arm, twisting around so the spray splattered the sink. He softly exhaled, then inhaled. It was good tequila. Magnificent.

Finally, he took a long swig and sucked it into his whole body. The ducks disappeared.

"Cigarette," he said weakly and took another sip from the bottle.

Snodgrass flashed open a gold cigarette case filled with blue-ringed smokes. With deft hands, Daniels plucked out all of them, leaving the case shining and empty before Snodgrass could close it. He stuffed one in his mouth and the rest in his pocket.

"Those are imported Turkish, my special blend," Snodgrass whined.

Daniels shrugged. "Got a light?"

"I'd like some of them returned."

"I'll give you two. Got a light?"

"You'll return the rest."

"All right. Four."

"All of them."

"They're crushed. You wouldn't want crushed cigarettes, would you?"

Snodgrass snapped the case shut and returned it to his vest pocket. "You're a disgrace. No wonder upstairs is so happy to get rid of you."

He did not look at Daniels when he said it, but busied himself taking three form papers and a small green check from his case. "Sign these and this is your check."

"I don't have a pen."

"Return this one," Snodgrass said, offering a gold pen.

Daniels grasped the pen between right thumb and forefinger, looking at it quizzically. "It's not one of your idiot gas gun devices, is it?"

"No, it's not. That was always the trouble with you, Daniels. You were never a team player. You never learned to adjust to modern methods."

Daniels steadied the bottle between his knees and signed the papers in long even grade-school penmanship strokes. He finished with a flourish. "What did I sign?"

"That you resign officially from Calchex Industries for which you have worked for twenty years, the only firm for which you have worked."

"All three of them say that?"

"No. The others say that you resigned from the firm because you embezzled money from it."

"Pretty nice. Anytime I open my mouth, you can get a warrant, pick me up nice and legal and no one will ever see me again."

"Well, if you want to be crude about it, yes," Snodgrass said, his eyebrows arching disdainfully. "Ordinarily, of course, such a thing would never happen. But you're not an ordinary case." He forced the papers into his attache case, then, smiling as though someone had just forced gravel into his gums, he surrendered the check.

"This should bring you up to date," Snodgrass said. "Your next pension check will arrive about May first." He looked Daniels up and down as though Barney were a malignant tumor. "This is just my personal opinion, Daniels," Snodgrass added, "but, frankly, it makes me sick to see you collect a pension at all, after what you did to the company back there in Hispania."

"I know how you feel, Max," Barney said sympathetically. "The company gave me the fantastic opportunity of being tortured limb by limb for three months, having my fingers broken at the hands of your local thugs, getting drugs poured down my throat, not to mention the exquisite pleasure of feeling your emblem burned into my belly with hot irons, and I have the nerve to accept a four hundred dollar check from you." He shook his head. "Some people just got no gratitude." He drank deeply from his bottle.

"You know we didn't do that," Snodgrass snapped.

"Stuff it, Max." He drank again. The liquor felt like a friend. "I don't care. You and the rest of your clowns can do whatever you want. I'm out."

"The company didn't do it," Max said stubbornly. Barney waved him away.

"Tell me something, Snodgrass. I've always wondered. Is there really a Calchex Industries?"

"Certainly," Snodgrass said, glad to be off the subject.

"What does it do besides provide pensions for cashiered CIA agents?"

"Oh, we operate a very thriving business. At our main plant in Des Moines, we manufacture toy automobiles aimed at the overseas market. We sell these to a major company in Dusseldorf. There they are all melted down and the steel is sold back to us to make more toys. All very up and up. We own both Calchex and the German company. Calchex hasn't missed a dividend in fifteen years."

"Good old American enterprise."

"Are you planning to work, Daniels?"

"Yes, yes. Quit peeing your pants about what I'm going to do with the rest of my life. I am planning on devoting the major portion of it to research on the lifesaving properties of tequila."

"I mean a job. We can't have you running around getting involved in wild schemes." He looked worried.

"I've got a job," Daniels lied.

"Nothing in South America, of course."

Daniels sipped some more tequila and nodded slowly. "I know what I'm allowed to do."

"Just so you know. Nothing controversial and nothing outside the borders of the United States."

"Don't worry about it. I'm going to be a librarian."

"I suppose you expect me to believe that."

"I do."

Snodgrass turned crisply to go. Before he reached the kitchen doorway, he turned back to face Daniels. "I'm sorry things didn't work out for you," he said, suddenly contrite about his crack that Barney didn't deserve his paltry pension. Daniels had been one of the best agents the company had ever used. And use him it had, over and over, in missions where none of the CIA's expensive gadgetry was worth a fart in the wind next to Barney's courage and cunning.

There had been no one better. And now there was no one worse. Snodgrass looked to Daniels, sucking on his tequila bottle like a gutter rummy, and remembered the final episode in the professional life of Bernard C. Daniels. How he had crawled into Puerta del Rey more dead than alive after God knew what unspeakable happenings in the Hispanian jungle, how he drank himself back to health, and then called a press conference to announce, between hacking up blood and giggling drunkenly: "Do not fear. The CIA is here."

In five minutes, he spilled more about CIA operations than Castro had learned in five years.

Snodgrass looked at the bottle, then up at Barney.

"Forget it," Barney said, answering the question in Snodgrass's eyes. "It just happened and there isn't any why. And don't knock the tequila. God's greatest gift to tortured man."

He slid forward off the sink. "Now go home. I've got some serious drinking to do."

And Max Snodgrass, whose income tax return listed him as executive vice president of Calchex Industries, walked out of the house and drove away.

Barney wondered, as he polished off the last of the tequila and staggered back to his spot on the upstairs floor, how long the vice president of Calchex Industries would wait before having him killed.