Ah, Treachery!

Chapter 35

At dusk that same day, General Walker Hudson stood at a sixth-floor window of the Marriott Hotel just across Key Bridge from Georgetown. He stood, cigar in one hand, a drink in the other, staring across the Potomac as Washington’s lights came on in what was to him their usual illogical pattern.

The General now wore a dark gray tweed suit, white shirt and a tie striped with crimson and yellow. In his left hand was a drink of Wild Turkey, chilled and diluted by a single ice cube. In his right hand was a cigar that boasted three-quarters of an inch of firm ash.

Seated in a chair behind him, staring at the room’s taupe carpet, was Colonel Ralph Millwed — elbows on spread knees, both hands clutching a glass that was empty save for two ice cubes. The Colonel now wore a gray worsted suit, blue shirt and a blue and crimson tie.

Without looking up, Millwed said, “Go on.”

“Where was I?” the General asked.

“Sneaking down the alley.”

“Right. I’d parked two blocks away — but I told you that, didn’t I?”

“Right.”

“The alley was fenced on both sides and when I came to the gate I opened it and found myself in the garden, which was an absolute mess.”

“What’d you wear?”

“Coveralls. The green ones with ‘L&D Restorations’ across the back. Pity about the garden, though. All dead grass and leaves. Then I opened the screen door and tried the kitchen door knob. It turned as expected and I was inside by eleven-seventeen—”

“Looked at your watch, did you?”

“Right. Where were you then?”

“Where I was supposed to be,” Millwed said, not looking up from his inspection of the carpet. “At the Safeway on Wisconsin, putting a move on the woman.”

The General nodded, studied the lights across the river again and said, “He was in the living room. Sitting in a chair — his favorite, I suspect. He was a little hunched over, studying the floor, holding a glass and having himself a morning drink. Not, I think, the first of the day.”

“What’d he do?” the Colonel said to the floor.

“You mean was he surprised, shocked, any of that?”

“Yes.”

“He heard me, looked up, saw my weapon and said, ‘What the fuck d’you want?’ So I told him.”

“What’d he say then?”

The General drank some whiskey, admired the ash on the cigar, drew in some smoke, blew it out and said, “That he needed to piss.”

“You let him?”

“Why not? The bathroom was upstairs anyway. So upstairs we went. He pissed. I watched. And after that he handed them over.”

“Just like that?”

“He had no choice, Ralph.”

“It was loaded — his piece?”

“Fully loaded.”

“And the other stuff?”

“They were nicely hidden, but all there. The photograph of the four of us. And the thirty-two red spiral notebooks. By that I mean their covers were red.”

“Where’d he hide ’em?”

“The weapon wasn’t really hidden. It was in the drawer of a bedside table. The notebooks and the photo were behind the baseboard behind a bed. We had to move the bed out a couple of feet to get to it.”

“You helped him, huh?”

“The bed’s legs were on casters.”

“Funny kind of bed.”

“It was more of a studio couch really. After he handed it all over I got down and took a look just to make sure he hadn’t squirreled away something else. After the bed was back in place, I told him to lie facedown on it with his hands behind him. He called me some names, then did what I said.”

“You read them then? The nasty parts?”

“Every word.”

“It all there?”

“Every last detail. You. Me. The Atlacatl battalion. Names. The money. The Mickey Mouse seal. And Twodees. All of it.”

“What about Twodees’s wife?”

“That, too. In detail.”

“Shit. He wasn’t supposed to know about that.”

“He was a spy, for God’s sake,” the General said. “And a competent one when he got around to it. He wrote it all in black ink with a real fountain pen and no cross-outs. His penmanship was pure Palmer method, which they still must’ve taught when he was in grade school.”

“And after you read it?” Millwed asked.

“We went back downstairs. He sat down in the same chair. Poured himself a drink but didn’t offer me one. Lit a Pall Mall. Had a big gulp of booze. Put the glass down and took a drag on his cigarette and I shot him right after he blew the smoke out.”

“With his own weapon,” Millwed said.

The General nodded.

“And left it on the floor near his right hand like I told you.”

“Precisely as you told me.”

The Colonel finally looked up. “Somebody moved it. The weapon.”

“Yes,” the General said, still staring out into the Washington night. “Somebody did.”

“Patrokis probably,” the Colonel said. “They had him on some shit detail in Vietnam, investigating suicides. He probably moved the piece to Viar’s lap or to the floor between his legs or wherever it was that made ’em rule it suicide.” Colonel Millwed grunted. “I wasn’t expecting that fucking Patrokis.”

The General turned from the window, went over to an ashtray, tapped off his inch and a quarter of ash and examined the Colonel. “Just as I wasn’t expecting the woman to con you out of that tape.”

“She knew who I was, for Christ sake,” Millwed said. “She wasn’t supposed to know that.”

“Forget the tape,” the General said.

“Forget it?”

“Certainly. Now that Viar’s killed himself, what does it prove? That an unmarried colonel on extended temporary duty took time off to bed the attractive daughter of an old friend and, being the soul of discretion, used an out-of-the-way motel. If the tape should surface somewhere, I might have to place a naughty-naughty letter in your file. But what the hell, they’ll say. At least it wasn’t some fifteen-year-old boy.”

“I don’t want any letter,” Millwed said.

“Forget the letter. It hasn’t happened, it probably won’t and we have something else to decide.”

“Twodees,” the Colonel said.

“Twodees,” the General agreed.

Millwed turned to reach for the bottle of Wild Turkey and poured an inch of whiskey into his glass. He raised the bottle questioningly at the General, who shook his head. The Colonel replaced the bottle, tasted his drink and said, “You know what I really want?”

“Sure, Ralph. You want your own personal copies of Hank Viar’s little red notebooks.”

“Yes, sir. Exactly, sir.”

“You’ll get copies.”

“When?”

“After Kite does Twodees.”

“I want them now, General,” Millwed said, not quite making it an order.

The General nodded patiently, as if dealing with a fool. “I didn’t quite finish, Colonel.”

“Then finish.”

“You’ll have your very own Xeroxed copies of Viar’s journals as soon as Kite does Twodees — and you do Kite.”

The Colonel leaned back in his chair, nodding contentedly. “I wouldn’t mind doing Kite. With him and Twodees both gone, that’d leave who?”

“Nobody.”

“What about the Altford woman, Patrokis and General Winfield?”

“They weren’t in El Salvador.”

“Neither was Kite.”

“We’ll just have to pretend he was,” General Hudson said.