Get Thee Behind Me...

Chapter 1

In January he was George Cooper, doing a quiet job in a quiet way, thankful for these quiet years after the bad years — the very bad years. And then in March he was driving a big raspberry convertible down Route 19, through Tarpon and Clearwater, heading for St. Pete and the Bradenton ferry, and he wasn’t George Cooper any more. His name was Allan Farat and the states of Illinois, Ohio and Michigan were all interested in his whereabouts.

He sat slouched behind the wheel in the expensive and too-sharp suit, staring ahead at the narrow asphalt of Florida, tinged green by the ovoid sun glasses. He felt excited, uncomfortable, afraid and almost entirely unreal.

Abelson had put it to him nicely. You had to give Abelson that.

“Understand, Cooper. We can’t order you to do this. We’d like you to do it. If you feel you can. It’s going to be hot and it’s going to be dirty. We’d rather use somebody who has their hand in. But we can’t find anybody who looks even remotely like Allan Farat. But you... you could be Farat’s brother. You’ll get the right dye job on your hair and we’ll have a good man put a scar on the bridge of your nose and you’ll be Farat. Look at the picture again. Go ahead.”

The glossy print had been placed on his desk. A strange feeling to see yourself, even to the way you hold a cigarette, sitting in an unknown nightclub with a blonde you never met. “It’s weird, Abelson.”

“Weird enough to jump at. We know this. We know Rocko Kadma, after all these years of staying nicely deported, is on his way back. We think Allan Farat helped with the arrangements. We know that they’re so cute that we can’t get near them. But you can, Cooper. You can go climb in their pockets.”

“Nice,” George had said, “but what about Farat? A little awkward if he shows up, isn’t it?”

“He won’t. He’s dead. We trapped him, alone, outside of St. Paul three weeks ago. He made a fuss. Somebody shot for the gun shoulder and hit him in the throat instead. It’s been kept under cover. We’ve got his car and his clothes and his luggage and his rings and a dossier a foot thick. But we can’t demand that you do it, Cooper. That’s up to you. Don’t answer right now. Think it over.”

Abelson had been cute, and Abelson had known right from the beginning what the answer had to be. Big paternal Uncle Sam had been paternal long enough. George had been OSS in the Far East. A rough boy. A big, fast, rough, smart boy. The kind you can stick behind Jap lines for eighteen months and hope for the best. Seventeen would have been all right. Eighteen had cracked one George Cooper open — right down the middle. Eighteen months had turned him, for a time, into a retrogression case. Back in the sixth grade, he was. And worrying about Geography Regents when they air-snatched him out. One intensively trained intelligence agent ruined by those last four weeks.

Nobody blamed George. He knew that. Eighteen months was just a little too long without relief. And, of course, the malaria, yaws, chiggers and a touch of amoeba hadn’t helped a bit.

But Uncle Sam is paternal. Shift the boy to another agency when the OSS fades out of the picture. Keep him under the wing because somewhere along the line he lost the willingness or ability to make decisions.

And so the quiet years. Put this paper in that file and write a letter based on form 3000Z. Check in at nine and out at five and take your thirty days leave. Live in a room and lock the door at night and move away from people who don’t like those three A.M. screams that come along sometimes when you dream that they’ve brought in a regiment and cut you and your Kachins off from the mountain hideout.

Abelson laid it on the line without saying so. He said, “You’re the only one we can use. Think it over. You’ve been trained to think on your feet.” There was something unsaid, like, “You’ve had a free ride for five years, boy. Here’s a chance to earn your keep. If you pass it up, you’ll be let go one of these days.”

Abelson said: “Being a single guy you can drop out of sight this way.” He didn’t say, “This is one where we wouldn’t want to send a guy with a family.”

That was in January. Think it over on Sunday, George. So he thought it over. He thought of being frightened. Genuine fright isn’t a harmless expression. It does something. It churns up through your guts day after day and keeps exploding in your brain until at last something has to give.

He thought it over until the sweat soaked the sides of his pants at the beltline where it had run from his armpit. He didn’t know the file on Farat. He knew a lot of files on Farat’s buddies. Nice playmates. Nothing blatant. Just the quiet sense of mercy and justice that you would expect in a hooded cobra.

Get off your back and earn your keep, boy. The free ride is over.

Driving south through Florida, along the gulf coast, Cooper thought that it would be less confusing to change from Cooper to Farat if there had only been one Cooper. But there were two Coopers. One was the pre-eighteen months Cooper. Ready to eat the world like a crisp red apple. Then the post-war Cooper. The one with no taste for apples. The quiet one in the quiet years.

He had gone to Abelson and said, “I’ll do it.”

Three words that were like a fuse. In seven weeks you have to unlearn somebody named George and learn somebody named Allan.

Where were you at Christmas time in 1942?

What was your number in Atlanta? Who was your cell-mate? What time was mess?

How do you sit in a chair? What’s your favorite drink? Where did you buy the pinstripe? How many miles on the convertible? Where is Alice? What’s your pet name for her? How do you like your steaks? Do you play the horses? How do you bet? How much do you tip a barber?

Abelson gave him the final briefing. “You’re good, Cooper. You are Allan Farat. Enough to give me the creeps. I’ve talked to Farat. Now you’ve got it. His car and his clothes and his guns and his snotty expression and his cocky walk. Here’s your roll. Sixteen hundred. We found a letter on him. Here it is. It doesn’t tell much. Just that Kadma’s going to arrive at the Hutcheon place on Catboat Key near the end of March and he wants to thank you. We’ve got a completely negative report on the possibility of keeping the place under observation.

“Your job is this. Go in there. Find out who wants Kadma back in this country. Find out who financed it. Find out what they want him for. Get all the dope and get out. Memorize this paper and destroy it. It tells you how to get in touch with two good men we’ll plant in Sarasota. We have every confidence in you, Cooper. Tonight you’ll be picked up and taken to where the car is hidden. Take any route you want. Stay out of trouble on the way down. If you get in a spot where it will help you to prove your association, you’ll find credentials tar-taped to the underside of the lid of the air filter in the car.”

And the convertible droned south over the asphalt, rolling through the scrub country.

He could feel it in the way he was treated. The hotel desks. The clerks dared show only the very faintest contempt. Service was quick and good. And when the room doors were closed and he looked in the mirrors, he knew why. The surgeon had been good. He’d added that tiny extra bit of fullness to the outside corners of the upper eyelids. The scar on the nose matched the scar on the corpse to the last milimeter.

A tall black haired hood with lazy eyelids and two hundred dollar suits and an air of amused insolence and a habit of calling all strangers “Luke”. Women looked at him in the way they had once looked at the pre-war George Cooper.

On the short trip down he tried to bury George Cooper. He tried to think as Allan Farat, who had killed for profit, would think. And — above all — he kept from thinking about what he might do under strain. The free ride was over. The quiet years were ended. All the letters had been written and all the papers had been filed.

But he couldn’t help remembering what the psychiatrist had said at the army hospital. “If you avoid tension and irritating situations, there is no reason why you shouldn’t live a normal, happy life.”

He’d used the wrong word. Happy. George Cooper had existed. Nothing more.

And now the knowledge was clear — dredged up from the depths of Abelson’s brown eyes — George Cooper might very probably cease doing even that. A hell of a man to send on this sort of a deal.

But Abelson had covered it. “You see, Cooper. There’s no one else.”

Catboat Key was six miles south of the center of Sarasota, stretching a narrow way into the Gulf. It wasn’t as developed as Siesta Key or Longboat Key. Now, with the destination close, he felt a curious and deceptive calm. Abelson’s maps had been thorough. Maps in the modern manner which were made by a loafing plane of the pleasure type, equipped with camera.

He knew where to turn off the pot-holed concrete onto the sand road even without the help of the neat green and bronze sign which said “Carla Hutcheon”. The road curved down through a thick growth of mangroves and scrub to the causeway pictured on the map. It was hardtop laid on a hundred yards of fill across a bay. As he drove across the causeway he could see, on either side of the closed gate, the tall fence enclosing the bay side of the little island, a cabin cruiser moored at the left. He stopped with the front bumper almost against the closed gate and pressed the horn ring in a long loud blast that sent up a flapping circle of birds.

An old man in stained khakis ambled into sight, heading for the gate. A sparse white beard was stained lemon at the corners of his mouth. The heels of his shoes dragged in the dust as he walked. Cooper remembered his acquired character in time to give the horn another long blast. The old man shifted into a jerky trot, frowning with annoyance.

Near the gate he swerved over to a phone box fastened to a palm bole.

“What’s your name, mister?”

“Farat. Open up or I’ll bunt it down, Luke.”

“Got orders, mister. Got to phone the house.”

“Make it fast, Luke. We got a hot sun out here.”

“Farat you said?”

The old man phoned. It seemed to take a long time. Cooper blasted the horn again and the old man glared. “Can’t hear with you doing that, mister.”

He hung up and came over and opened the gate. Cooper started fast enough to make the old fellow jump to one side. He drove around a few bends and down through a narrow lane of trees that opened up with surprising suddenness. The house lay squarely ahead, just beyond a big concrete parking apron. It was long, low, sprawling, theatrical. Vertical redwood and white limestone, acres of glass and roof-decks with bright umbrella-ed tables. It followed the line of a crest and beyond it the white sand sloped down to the dancing blue and soap-sud crests of the Gulf.

Cooper was overly conscious of the shutting of the gate behind him. At any time on the trip down he could have turned back. Even while waiting for the phone call to be put through, he could have twisted the car around and roared away. But now it was done.

He turned the ignition key off with the feeling of performing an irrevocable act. He got out and stretched the stiffness out of arms and legs. A picture out of the file on Farat appeared. He was a curly blond with narrow shoulders, red pulpy mouth, tiny hard blue eyes. He stood there and the shock was evident in those blue eyes. He wore swimming trunks and a beach coat with matching design of bright red sailfish on a white background. The carbine in the crook of his arm was completely out of place in the sun glare.

“Hi, Billy,” Cooper said idly.

Billy shifted the carbine. It was aimed at Cooper’s middle and a thin tan finger was through the guard. “I thought it was a gag,” Billy said. “I thought somebody was doing it for a laugh. What’s your angle, Farat?”

“No angle, Billy. I’m just here to say hello to Rocko.”

Cooper couldn’t figure it out. Billy Lemp seemed to be undone by something beyond his comprehension.

“How long does this go on, Luke?” Cooper asked.

Carla Hutcheon came quickly out of a door that opened onto the parking apron. When she saw Farat she stopped dead and all expression left her face. Cooper had memorized her history. She was in her middle forties. Once upon a time she had been very lovely. Nick Floria had found her dancing in a small Chicago club. For six years she had been Nick’s girl. When Nick had a slight difference of opinion with the Syndicate and ended up in the lake with cinderblocks wired to his ankles, Carla demonstrated unexpected executive talent by whipping Nick’s lieutenants into line and taking over his territory, after convincing the Syndicate that she could handle it.

She had grown in many ways. Profits were invested in legitimate enterprise, and she hired bright and honest young men to run them properly. There were resort hotels and a chain of deluxe tourist courts. She was cold, competent and thorough. A big hard-mouthed brunette with pretty eyes, mahogany tan over a body gone to fat.

“Have you gone completely crazy, Allan?”

“Got a nice room for me, Carla?”

Billy appealed to her. “What the hell will Rocko think?”

“Shut up, Billy. Let me think. It looks as though he thought that by coming here he could make that other business look like a frame. But even Farat isn’t that stupid, are you, Allan? Tell mama, Allan. What’s on your sly little mind?”

“You know better than that, Carla. I’ll do my talking to Rocko.”

“How many words do you expect to say? Three? Four?”

“It’ll look funny,” Billy complained. “Him here like this. Like we were crossing the Rock.”

Billy moved closer. Cooper’s mind was racing while he tried to keep his expression calm and untroubled. The file had been incomplete. There was something Abelson hadn’t known. There was evidently a very good reason why this was the last place the genuine Farat would have come to. And this deviation from expected behavior by the fraudulent Farat had caught them flatfooted.

“Rocko knows me better than that,” Carla said.

“Let me take him over in the woods,” Billy said. “It’ll look better. We can show him to Rocko.”

“Not with Barbara here, stupid!” Carla snapped.

Billy moved another step closer. The eagerness was in him. Cooper could sense the slow upward spiral of the diseased mind that would seek any rationalization to justify killing. Abelson had warned him about Billy.

Carla still seemed indecisive. Cooper felt the claw and drag of fear, like a cat that swung from his flesh. The hot sun felt cold on the back of his neck. Fear gave his muscles explosive speed. He slapped the carbine barrel up and to the side with his left hand, feeling the whip-crack of air against his cheek as the carbine spat flatly, and then chopped his right hand over and down onto the exposed angle of jaw. The carbine clattered onto the concrete. Billy took two wild running steps away from Cooper and went down onto his face, the beach coat flapping up to cover the back of his head.

Cooper snatched up the carbine, held it flat out on both hands and presented it to Carla as she backed away. “When it’s due,” he said, “I don’t want to get it from little Willy there.”

Her face changed. The reluctant smile spread heavy lips. “All right, Allan. You may have gone crazy, but you still move the way I like to see. Stand the gun inside the hallway there. And put your top up. It gets damp at night.”

“What was that shot, Carla?” a clear young voice asked.

They both looked up. A young girl stood on the edge of the sundeck over their heads, outlined against the deep blue of the sky. She wore a one-piece strapless bathing suit of aqua velvet, and hair like some new amalgam of copper and gold hung warmly to tanned shoulders. She stood poised there and Cooper saw the broad forehead, level eyes, wide firm mouth below the small tilt of nose. In stance and pose, above him as she was, Cooper thought of some statue erected to that one year of strengthened promise and untried beauty that each woman has in her lifetime.

Carla exhibited an entirely unexpected concern over Billy as she ran to his side and turned him over tenderly. She explained, “Billy was carrying the gun and he stumbled and fell and it went off, dear.”

Billy’s left cheek had been gouged deeply by the concrete. He opened virulent blue eyes, focused them on Cooper and said, “You—” He got no further as Carla’s strong brown hand was clamped over his lips.

“You were clumsy, Billy,” Carla said.

Billy sat up. He glanced up at the girl on the roof edge. He looked over at Cooper. “I sure was. I won’t make that mistake again.”

“Run along and fix your face, Billy,” Carla said.

He got up and shuffled moodily toward the house. “Allan, this is my sister, Barbara. Barbara, Mr. Farat, a new houseguest.”

“Hello,” Barbara said absently. She had a troubled expression. She turned and walked out of sight.

Carla fastened strong fingers on the lapel of Cooper’s jacket. Her voice was low and hoarse. “There’s one house rule, Farat. Leave Barbara alone. I know your habits. Don’t talk to her unless you have to. I’ve put that kid through the fanciest schools there are. She doesn’t know from nothing, Farat. She thinks my friends are peculiar. I tell her you have to have that sort of friends when you run hotels. I’m trying to get her out of here before Rocko arrives. If you spill one little thing to her, so help me, the body we show Rocko won’t even look like you.”

He pushed her hand away. “Draw me a picture, mama.”

“I mean it, Farat. All the way down the line.” She grinned suddenly. “Anyway, you won’t have any time for Barbara. Not with your old friend here.”

“Who?”

“Alice. Who else? She came the way I thought you were going to come. With a gun in your back.”

“How is she taking it?” he asked. It seemed like a safe question.

“You know Alice, Farat. She’s taking it with rye.”

“How about that room? How about somebody to carry my stuff?”

Within fifteen minutes he was in a ground floor bedroom on the south wing. A dark blue wall-to-wall rug. Squat blonde furniture. A tiny bath with glass shower stall. Huge windows overlooking the Gulf. A heavy air-conditioner set into the side window. Once he had closed the door the weakness struck him. He walked over to the bed and sat down heavily. His hands shook as he lit a cigarette.

One thing was now certain. The job they had done on him had been good. So good that there had not even been any comment about any small change in his appearance. He trembled for a long time and when the trembling ceased, he felt enormously weary. He ticked off in his mind the people he had seen. The old man in khakis. Carla, Barbara and Billy. Two young men in white coats, with Mexican or Cuban faces — a tall angular woman glimpsed through the swinging door into the kitchen.

He glanced at his watch. Nearly one o’clock. He unpacked, shook the wrinkles out of Farat’s clothes, hung them carefully in the big closet. From the attitude of Carla Hutcheon, he suspected that he would not be permitted to keep Farat’s guns for very long. They were nice weapons. Smith and Wesson 38’s with stubby barrels. The underarm strap of Farat’s holster was stained with the dead man’s perspiration.

On a hunch he looked carefully around the room. He found a six inch square grill set into the ceiling of the closet and guessed that it was a hedge against humidity and mold. The two screws came out easily. He set one gun, with full chambers, out of sight over the edge of the closet ceiling and replaced the grill. It would take some time to recover the gun, but it gave him the feeling of having done one small constructive thing. Carla had said he could have lunch any time he wished. How would Farat have dressed? He decided on faun slacks, a grey-green sports shirt. Then, as the day got cooler toward evening, he could add the bright jacket of yellow Irish linen.

He put his hand on the knob of the door and it took all his will to turn it, walk casually out. He stopped in the hallway and lit a cigarette with Farat’s lighter, a heavy French butane job. The house was quiet.

The monotonous thud of waves on the beach seemed to be the only sound. The main portion of the house was a huge room with a glass wall that faced the beach. The center portion of the glass slid to one side to form a ten foot opening. It was open and sea breeze blew into the room. The look of the room reassured him. It was not a room for violence. It was a room out of an architectural magazine. It had the sterility of any room where the decorator is given too free a hand.

One of the white jacketed boys was dusting, with a lazy economy of movement. Another picture from the Farat file sat in a deep chair, and the name jumped immediately into Cooper’s mind. Garry Susler. One of the old crew from Nick Floria’s day. Absurdly like a cartoon of a hood, or of the god of war. A cropped bullet head and prognathous jaw and inch-high brow and pulped nose, mounted on a round fibrous body.

The masked grey eyes flickered toward Cooper. The heavy face didn’t change expression. “Some guys can’t learn,” Susler said in a husky-hoarse voice.

“What’s she got you doing these days, Garry? Walking the dog?”

“Talk big. Goon. Talk big.”

Susler pulled himself out of the chair and came over. “Patties high, boy. This won’t take long.”

Susler patted him quickly in all the likely places. “So you’re clean. Now go out and play. Have a happy time while you’re still breathing, Farat.”

“It’s in my suitcase, the grey one with the green stripes at each end. Holster and all. Put it where the salt air won’t get at it.”

“Only one? Not like you, Farat. Is the other one stashed in the car?”

“Only one this time. I had to get rid of one.”

Susler gave him a sardonic bow. “If you don’t mind, sir, I’ll look for two, sir.”

“Who else is around, Garry? I’ve only seen Carla, Billy and you. And Carla’s sister.”

“Just one more. One you don’t know. Bud Schanz. Or maybe you do know him.”

“Should I?”

Susler shrugged. “He brought Alice in. Found her in Cleveland and got her taken drunk so she sobered up here. The two of us were going after you, but you saved us the trouble.”

Cooper walked through the wide opening in the glass wall. Susler lumbered off down the hallway to the south wing. Cooper paused on the terrace. He snapped the cigarette down onto the sand. Gulls dipped along the surf line, calling in their gamin’s voices, like rowdy children at play. Far out a pelican folded his wings and dived with a splash like a small frag bomb.

He had done the last thing that Farat would have done. Appear here of his own volition. It compounded the problem by making it necessary for him to think of some reasoning that would fit Farat’s possible plans. To appear here had the nasty ring of suicide. The same glint had appeared in the eyes of Billy, Carla and Susler. They had looked at him the way they would have looked at a man already dead.

One of the swarthy boys came out the opening behind him, carrying a tray of drinks. The boy turned to the right across the terrace and went down the two shallow steps at the side, walking cautiously on the sand. Cooper followed him at a slower pace. As they passed the corner of the building, Cooper saw the group in gay colors.

Carla sat on a striped towel, her arms resting on her heavy flexed knees. Billy, the bandage white against his face, lay nearby on his beach coat, his body oiled. A taffy blonde lay spread-eagled on her face on a maroon blanket. She wore a Bikini suit of bandanas, casually knotted, and, as with all Bikini suits, the rear view was more ludicrous than entrancing. A strange young man sat beside the taffy blonde, using a trick backrest of aluminum and blue canvas. He wore skin-tight trunks in violent cerise. Barbara was a figure in the distance, walking along the surf line. Billy, Carla and the young man stared expressionlessly at Cooper. The taffy blonde didn’t move. Cooper paused, lit another cigarette, moved toward the group.