Checkpoint Charlie

Charlie’s Last Caper

Myerson lived — if that is the word for his peculiar existence — in an ugly house hidden away in a green part of Virginia that might have been a posh suburb were it not for the railroad embankment below the back of the property. Myerson didn’t seem to mind the noise of the trains — or if he did he probably consoled himself with the knowledge that the clattering freights had made it possible for him to buy the land for a song.

When I arrived in the rent-a-car he met me in the driveway. He looked grumpy and unstrung — I couldn’t remember seeing him so nerved up.

“Did you check out a pistol?”

It was a revolver, not a pistol, but Myerson was indifferent to such distinctions and I didn’t say anything; I answered him with a dry look. He’d asked me to requisition the thing and he ought to have known better than to ask me if I’d obeyed — it was another index of how rattled he was.

I squeezed out from under the steering wheel — it has been decades since Detroit last designed a car commodious enough for a man of my bulk — and showed him the weapon. He gave it a cross glance as if suddenly he couldn’t recall why he’d asked my to bring it.

I said, “I’ll use it for a paperweight if you like.”

He clenched his jaw. I said, “I’ll even let you borrow it to shoot rats in your woodpile but that’s as far as I go. As you know, I don’t shoot people. Any fool can shoot people. I’m far too old to start being a fool.”

“You’re far too old and far too fat to be much use to anybody for anything else.”

“I didn’t hasten out here to let you sharpen your tongue on me, either.”

“All right, Charlie. All right.”

“What’s the flap? Why here and not in the office?”

“They’ve got Internal Security people crawling all over the office.” But he said it as if his heart weren’t in it.

“I. S.? What for?”

“Who knows.” He seemed bitter — more weary that I’d ever seen him. “Let me have that thing.” He held out his hand.

When I hesitated his eyes burned briefly with the familiar arrogance of command. A few things ran through my mind but finally I let him take it.

“Wait in the car.” He turned away.

“As a host,” I told him, “you’re a prince.”

“It’s a flimsy house, Charlie. I don’t think the floors could take your weight.” He trudged away.

The reason he hadn’t invited me inside was that his wife Marge detested me. Myerson at one time had taken evident pleasure in explaining to me how loathesome and repulsive she found me. “You nauseate the poor woman, Charlie. You remind her of cancer cells.”

That “poor woman” was a supercilious rail-thin dried-up clubwoman who played incessant golf, drank martinis from noon on, and wore hats with peonies on them. At least I assumed they were hats because she wore them on her head. Under the circumstances I didn’t mind not being invited inside but I was curious to know what he wanted the revolver for. I wouldn’t have put it past him to use it to murder his wife — it had my fingerprints on it, after all, and it was checked out in my name — but even for Myerson, I thought, that would have been a bit raw.

He hadn’t gone into the house. He’d walked away from me around the corner of the screen porch and disappeared into the trees back toward the railroad embankment. A fly inside the porch was banging against the screen trying to get out. I couldn’t begin to fathom what Myerson was up to but I supposed it was possible he’d arranged a meeting back there in the woods with someone — one of ours or one of theirs. More likely one of theirs, I thought; that would explain his desire for a defense weapon.

But I resented his summoning me all the way from Langley just to deliver the revolver. I was the section’s premier field man — not Myerson’s bloody errand boy.

In the shade by the car I was working myself up to the tirade I was going to deliver to him when I heard the approach of one of the frequent freights that disturbed the peace thereabouts. The rataplan clatter grew to nearly earsplitting volume as the train went by. But even so I was certain the sound that punctuated it was the crack of a gunshot.

I’d heard too many of those to have mistaken it.

As I waddled into the woods I heard the train rumble away; it had dwindled nearly to silence by the time I came to the end of the copse above the embankment. I moved with care, staying just within the trees, not wanting to expose myself — I made too ample a target.

But nothing stirred along the embankment. Nothing at all — not even Myerson. He lay awkwardly asprawl on the grass.

He was dead.

I broke the news to the widow and made two phone calls, the second of them to the police. Then by mutual consent I withdrew from the house and returned to the embankment. Myerson, even dead, was better company than Marge.

The revolver was gone. It looked as if someone might have taken it away from him and then shot him, either with that revolver or with another. Myerson hadn’t died immediately. He’d crawled a few yards. The trail of bloodstains began some distance below him along the grassy bank; he’d been shot while standing right on the rim of the railroad cut. It was a brick retaining wall ten or eleven feet high. The grass sloped up from there to where he had collapsed and died.

I noticed one odd thing. He was wearing a shooter’s glove — cloth with leather patches. I hadn’t even known he’d owned one. He hadn’t been wearing it when I’d given him the revolver; I’d have noticed it.

Before the police arrived I had time to reflect on several things — mainly Myerson and my long acrimonious relationship with him. It had never been pleasant for either of us but it had been symbiotic and his death was neither a pleasure nor merely an annoyance. It probably meant the end of my career.

By dying he’d achieved his revenge at last. It was too ironic for anger; I could only brood at his corpse and acknowdege his victory. The apple-polishing political hack had won the last round. The bastard had beaten me. Within a week I knew I’d be out on the street without a job.

At first I thought that was the worst of it.

There was the tedium of dealing with the police. Then Joe Cutter arrived — he was the one I’d phoned first. Of all the people in our sector of the Agency, Joe is the one I want on my side in an emergency. He’s too handsome for his own good and he’s arrogant sometimes — he thinks he’s as good as I am but he’ll never quite achieve that — but he’s leagues ahead of the others. Joe Cutter is a throwback; like me he works from premises of talent and experience and instinct, and he never forgets a thing. Unlike the new breed, Joe knows there are still problems you can’t solve with computers and microfilm and hypodermics.

The County Medical Examiner was making his preliminary study; they hadn’t moved the body yet. Technicians and detectives prowled around, seeking clues, and Joe Cutter said to me, “Myerson had four kids, I think.”

“None of them worth a damn.” A workaholic father and an alcoholic mother — what could you expect? The four Myerson children — three boys, one girl — were in their twenties and thirties now but none of them had amounted to anything. Myerson had been forever bailing them out of jams, financial and otherwise. It was one reason he’d been unable to afford a better house than this clapboard white elephant by the tracks.

“For their sake,” Joe murmured, “I hope his life insurance was paid up.” He looked down toward the retaining wall: two cops and a dog handler with a Doberman were scouting the grass. Joe said, “They won’t find much. You said you heard a train go by just as the shot was fired? Whoever shot him probably jumped down on top of the train. They must move pretty slowly through that curve. Or maybe the guy was already on the train and shot Myerson from there. A tricky shot from the top of a moving freight car but I guess it’s possible. Myerson could’ve come down here to receive a package, you know — something somebody was supposed to toss to him from the train.”

The M.E. looked up at us. “He wasn’t shot from the train. Powder burns on his shirt front. He was shot at close range.”

Joe scowled at the bloodstained grass. “Then the train was the getaway vehicle. He used the train to mask the sound of the shot and then he used it to make his escape.” Joe turned to me. “So who was he?”

I shook my head: no idea. But I knew one thing. The bastard who’d killed Myerson might have done the world a favor but he’d done me out of a job.

I said, “I don’t suppose there’s a chance in hell they’d give you Myerson’s job.”

“No. They’ll give it to some hack who plays golf with the Director — somebody who’s earned a political favor. The same way they gave it to Myerson in the first place.” Joe looked bleak — partly, I’m sure, because he didn’t relish the idea of having to break in a new section chief.

“Funny,” I muttered, “all the dicey capers we’ve survived — Berlin, Moscow, all the tightropes and guantlets, and it ends here in the grass in his own backyard.”

Joe regarded me glumly. “What was the piece?”

“Standard thirty-eight caliber issue from the Agency armory. Why?”

“It’s not here.”

“I know.”

Joe said, “As a matter of policy the Agency keeps a sample bullet fired from each armory weapon. For ballistic comparisons. What happens if they dig this slug out of Myerson and it turns out to have been fired by the gun you signed out?”

“I know. They’ll try to pin it on me.”

“Everybody knows how you and Myerson felt about each other. He used to mention your name in the same tone of voice Napoleon must have used when he talked about Wellington.”

I said, “You’d better search me right now. I haven’t got it on me, but frisk me and make sure.”

“All right. But it won’t matter. They’ll say you had plenty of time to get rid of it. Charlie — listen. You didn’t kill him, did you?”

“And do myself out of a job? No. I didn’t shoot him, Joe.”

“And you don’t know who did.”

“No. I don’t know who did.”

“All right. Then we’d better find out what happened. Because if we don’t, they’ll hang it on you — and you won’t just be terminated, Charlie. You’ll be terminated with extreme prejudice.”

“Why not just say killed? It’s the damned euphemisms that’ll do us all in, in the end.”

When I arrived next morning at the Agency there were long faces around the conference table. Joe Cutter wasn’t there; this was Internal Security and the agent in charge was an amiable hatchet-man named Philip Grebe. He had small hard eyes and polished fingernails; his grey suit was too well tailored and his mustache too neatly trimmed — he was compulsive about details, a thorough and ruthless man but a fair one. He had an unpleasant job but he was good at it. I’d rendered a few favors and assistances to him in the past but that didn’t count for anything now, not with a cool sort like Grebe.

“You understand this isn’t a formal inquiry, Charlie. If we learn anything that’s pertinent to the case and not subject to the security laws we’ll pass it on to the county attorney in Virginia. But we’re not officially empowered to investigate murder cases. If it turns out, for example, that his wife killed him for the insurance or to settle a domestic spat then we have nothing to do with the case. But if it proves to be a problem inside the Agency we want to know about it.”

I said, “Was his insurance paid up?”

“To the hilt. He had outside policies in addition to his Civil Service insurance. Nearly half a million in benefits, all told. The beneficiaries are the widow and the four children — roughly a hundred thousand each.”

“Five good motives for murder,” I observed.

“Possibly.”

“But they don’t explain why he went down to the embankment with a loaded gun in his pocket, do they.”

“Quite,” Grebe said.

The silence that followed his comment was ominous.

Finally he said, “Shall we begin?”

“I thought we already had. You mind my asking one more question? I’ve been out of the country for a while, you know. I just got back day before yesterday. I’m not up on whatever’s been going on here in Langley. Myerson mentioned something yesterday — said I. S. was searching his office. What were you looking for?”

“Sorry, Charlie. That’s need-to-know.”

“Then can you tell me if you’ve got any glimmering of why he might have wanted a revolver?”

“I can answer that one. The answer is no.”

Joe cutter was on the phone when I went up to our section late that afternoon. When he cradled it he said, “How was it?”

“They’re friendly enough. But they think I blew him away.”

It was a bit of a jolt to see Joe in what had been Myerson’s chair. He said, “I’m acting chief until they appoint a replacement for him. It’s no fun, let me tell you. His papers are in a mess. I. S. was in here all day going through the stuff. They’ll be back again tomorrow.”

“What are they looking for?”

“They didn’t say.”

I glanced at the row of locked filing cabinets. “How far did they get?”

“They’re up to P to Q Third cabinet, top drawer.”

“Have you got the keys?”

He brooded at me. “What do you think you’d find?”

“Something that might tell us who he had the appointment with on the embankment.”

Joe considered it. “We haven’t time. They’ll be back in here at eight in the morning.”

“That gives us fifteen hours. Look, we’ll start with the R-S drawer — if there was anything in the earlier drawers they’d have found it.”

“Anything that vital, he’d have coded it into the computer and shredded the papers.”

“Joe, at least it’s worth a try.”

“Maybe. But don’t count on anything turning up.” But I knew he’d given in.

We set to work and it was drudgery: we had to read every sheet of every document in every folder and some of them were in code and I am not one of your speed readers. Most of it was routine stuff and after several hours I began to believe Joe was right. After all, Myerson hadn’t been stupid enough to have left anything too sensitive in those files. He’d been as security-conscious as anyone in our business and he knew where the on-off switch was located on the document-shredding machine. There were no naked records of our ongoing clandestine capers or any of that lot; most of it was standard administrative and personnel and budgetary material. Requisitions and vouchers and the like. Crushing boredom.

At half-past six in the morning Joe slammed the V-W drawer shut and jammed both fists into the small of his back and reared back, stretching his cramped back muscles. “Nothing — unless you count my expense vouchers for the last Warsaw trip. Maybe he planned to blackmail me with them.”

I read slower than Joe does; I was still at the beginning of my last drawer, the X-Y-Z tray. I closed up the Xerxes file — that was the code-name of a double-agent we were running inside the Soviet Embassy in Tokyo — and flipped past the metal “Y” tab. The first file behind the tab was marked Yevshenkovich, M. One of the defectors we’d brought over a few years back. I didn’t open the file; I merely scowled at it. “Joe? Have a look.”

He came sleepily to the drawer and blinked slowly at it. “What about it?”

“Think about it, Joe. What’s missing?”

He looked at me. “Yeah.” He touched the metal “Y” tab. “The first file under ‘Y’ is Yevshenkovich but that’s wrong, isn’t it. Yaskov. We’re missing our old chum Mikhail Yaskov.” Then his face lengthened. “No. It’s probably in the Inactive files. Yaskov’s officially retired from the KGB now.”

“But he’s still doing business from the Black Sea retirement villa. Yaskov’s no more inactive than I am. I’ve filed half a dozen reports on him myself in the past eight months. They ought to be in here. No — Myerson removed the Yaskov file. What was he trying to hide?”

Joe was already on his way to the far cabinet: Inactive. He bent over the bottom drawer and lifted a folder out. “He wasn’t hiding anything. It’s right here — see for yourself.”

I did and he was right. Baffled, I flipped it open. Yaskov, M. Inside were all the reports I’d filed, as well as data from a hundred other sources.

And mixed right in with it was the evidence that could put me in prison for forty years — or more likely in the crematorium.

Joe was glum. “Istanbul — tenth October. You were there, right?”

“Yes. Myerson sent me on a wild goose chase.”

“Vienna, third April?”

“Yes. Interpol conference.”

“Helsinki, fourth June — same again?”

“That was a legit job but it didn’t pan out.”

“Apparently Yaskov was in the same towns on the same dates. According to this, you met Yaskov secretly and didn’t report any of the meetings to Myerson.”

“I didn’t have any meetings with Yaskov, Joe.” I flipped a page in the file. “Source — M.S. Source — M.S. The same notation on every one. Who’s this mysterious ‘M.S.’ who’s been following me around?”

“Or following Yaskov around. That’s more likely, isn’t it.”

“Joe, I know every executive in this section and none of them have the initials M.S. on their real names or their code names or any other names.”

“Could be another section. Hell, it could be NSA or military intelligence or any one of half a dozen branches.” He studied me with canny speculation. “The way it looks, Myerson called you on the carpet about these secret meetings with a Soviet agent. And you — not knowing Myerson had left written evidence in the files — killed Myerson to keep him from having you terminated for treason.”

“Come on, Joe. Come on. Why on earth would Myerson order me to draw a revolver from the armory if he thought I was a traitor?”

“We only have your word for it that Myerson asked you to requisition the piece. It wasn’t Myerson who signed it out. It was you.”

And that was, indeed, the weapon that had killed him. The I.S. people had confirmed that twelve hours ago. The inquiry was to continue today and Grebe had left me to understand that if I didn’t come up with satisfactory answers I was in for a grueling grilling.

I walked to the L-M drawer and pulled Myerson’s own travel-voucher file; I went through it quickly, having a look at hotel and airline receipts. The shape of this thing was emerging from a mist in my tired mind and when I looked up at Joe I think I managed a grin. “I think I know who killed Myerson. I need a few more facts but at least I’ve got an idea where to look.”

“Take it easy before you jump to confusions, Charlie. You’re running on your nerve-ends just now. The shock of all this and no sleep for twenty-four hours and you haven’t even had a meal...”

“That kind of pressure — that’s when I’m at my best. You ought to know that, Joe.” I gave him my beaming smile. “It stirs up the adrenalin.”

“Have you seen any evidence that I haven’t seen?”

“Maybe just these.” I showed him two vouchers from Myerson’s travel records.

Joe looked at them but he didn’t seem impressed. “That’s clutching at straws, Charlie. I say again, take it easy.”

“Easy? It’s my neck they’re measuring for a garotte.”

He took the vouchers out of my hand and put them back into the file. “I don’t see anything in those to prove anything against anybody.”

“That’s because you’re still just a shade slower that I am. No offense, Joe. Maybe it’s just that you didn’t know Myerson quite as well as I did. Come on, we’ve just got time for breakfast before they start up the hearing again.”

I was glad to have Joe’s company at the I.S. conference table that morning and glad Grebe allowed him to sit in: that was a sign of the respect in which Joe Cutter was held throughout the Company.

Joe hadn’t said anything soppy but he was there at my side and that was sufficient measure of his faith in me and in my innocence, and I needed that just now. It bolstered my weary soul — and I believe it inclined Grebe and his associates to give me more latitude than they might have granted me if Joe hadn’t been there.

I said, “I hope I can clear this thing up before we waste any more time on false trails but I need to ask a few questions. May I?”

Grebe glanced at Joe Cutter and then said, “No blank checks, Charlie, but go ahead and we’ll see.”

“Myerson was wearing a shooting glove. Were there powder stains on it?”

“Yes.”

“Recent?”

“Yes. But that’s been explained. He’d been at his rod-and-gun club earlier the same day, sighting in a new deer rifle. His wife told us that. We examined the rifle. And the rod-and-gun people confirmed it. It’s all true.”

“I don’t doubt it. All right. Any luck tracking down that freight train?”

“It’s in Augusta. The FBI’s searching it now.”

“A hundred to one,” I said, “but they may find that thirty-eight revolver in a hopper car with my fingerprints on it. I assume you’ve got the results of the paraffin test I took yesterday at the armory?”

“Yes. Negative. But you could have been the one wearing the shooter’s glove at the time of the shooting.”

“It wouldn’t fit my hand, you know. But that’s minor.” I glanced at Joe. His eyelids looked heavy. Joe needs his eight hours; he burns up energy fast — it’s one of the disadvantages of being lean. I went on: “An I.S. team started tossing Myerson’s office the morning before the day he died. Is that right?”

“Possibly.”

“What were you looking for?”

“Sorry, Charlie.”

“It’s need-to-know, isn’t it? I need to know it. It’s my life on the line.”

“No.”

I said, “Then I’ll have a guess, and you can correct me if I’m wrong. You had a tip, didn’t you. Probably from a minor type in the Russian Embassy.”

“I can give you this much,” Grebe replied. “It was a telephone tip — anonymous.”

“Telling you if you combed Myerson’s records you’d find there was a traitor in his section.” I smiled. “The tip came from Mikhail Yaskov. I don’t mean it was necessarily Yaskov’s voice on the phone, but it originated with him.”

“What gives you that idea?”

I slipped the Yaskov file and Myerson’s travel records out of the briefcase and Grebe sat bolt upright when he saw the name tag on the Yaskov file. “Who authorized you to—”

“I’m acting section chief,” Joe murmured. “They’re my files now, Phil. I authorized it.”

I pushed the papers across the table and while Grebe examined them I said, “Myerson moved the Yaskov file to the Inactive cabinet. That’s why your people would’ve needed another day or two to find it. But he meant to draw your attention to it by moving it. I’m sure he moved it there after he learned your people were on their way to shake down his office. As soon as he heard about the pending I.S. toss he knew he was in trouble. So he scribbled a few phony reports from a nonexistent agent named ‘M.S.’ — probably ‘myself’. The handwriting looks crabbed, as if maybe he scribbled it with his left hand, but I suspect it’s Myerson’s. The phony reports try to show that I had a series of secret meetings with Yaskov in Istanbul and Vienna and Helsinki. I never saw Yaskov in any of those places. The interesting thing is, Myerson’s own travel vouchers show that Myerson himself was in Vienna on April third and in Helsinki on June fourth — the same days when Yaskov presumably was meeting me there. I didn’t meet Yaskov, but I suspect Myerson did. Myerson wouldn’t have turned traitor voluntarily, so I assume Yaskov must have had something on him. I have no idea what it was. But if you start looking for it you’ll probably find it. Nobody’s had reason to look for it before, have they.”

Grebe lifted his eyes from the papers. He didn’t speak at all. He only watched me, reserving judgment.

I said, “When the I.S. investigation came down, Myerson was in a trap and there wasn’t any way out of it. He couldn’t bluff it out because obviously Yaskov double-crossed him by tipping you. Yaskov always wanted to get Myerson and me out of the way — he’s spent half his life tripping over us and we’ve bested him too often to suit him. When I bluffed him out of Finland a year or two ago it must have been the last straw. First he dug up something on Myerson. He blackmailed Myerson into compromising himself. Then he betrayed Myerson’s treachery to you. Yaskov knew that would get Myerson out of his way — which also gets me out of the way, since without Myerson the Agency won’t keep me on.”

I gave Grebe an opening to speak but he only waited for me to finish; he knew I hadn’t the punch line yet.

I said, “Myerson knew he’d get fired at the very least. No pension, half his insurance canceled. He might be discredited, maybe go to prison, maybe be killed. I don’t know because I don’t know how serious the compromise was. Obviously Yaskov found some way to blackmail Myerson into doing the Russians a favor or two — and Yaskov must have kept the evidence of those favors. Whatever it was, Myerson had to know there was no way to get Yaskov off his back. So Myerson took the only way out but he hated me so much he had to take me with him.”

Grebe sat bolt upright. “What? You’re saying Myerson killed himself?”

“Of course he did. But he made it look like murder. Because the insurance wouldn’t have paid off on a suicide. And he made me look like the killer — and the traitor — because he needed a plausible murderer. He set me up with the motive, the means and the opportunity.”

Grebe settled back. “It’s a clever hypothesis, Charlie, but there’s no evidence to support it.”

“There are bits and pieces. One thing is those travel vouchers. They show I wasn’t the only one in the section who could have had those meetings with Yaskov. Another thing — why did he choose that morning to go shooting at the rod-and-gun club if he didn’t need an excuse for the fresh gunpowder on his shooting glove? And why did he move the Yaskov file over to the Inactive drawer if he didn’t want us to notice the shift? And there’s one other thing he didn’t take into account. It’s true that I was in on April third but I was only there four hours — it was an airport meeting with several Interpol people to update our data on one of the terrorist groups and I was never out of sight of half a dozen police executives. I couldn’t possibly have met Yaskov there, so that suggests all the ‘M.S.’ reports are fakes.”

Grebe chewed a pencil; the rest of them smoked and reached for their styrofoam coffee cups and it was clear what they were thinking: they were picturing Myerson on the lip of the embankment shooting himself in the chest rather than the head because he needed time to toss the revolver onto the passing train after he’d used it on himself; then dragging himself up away from the lip, not noticing the bloodstains he was leaving behind on the grass, and finally collapsing there and curling up like a strip of frying bacon, his last thoughts probably sour and resentful and filled with obscure regrets and rage. He’d been a bitter man always, a hearty politician on the surface with his clubhouse tan and his locker-room humor but that had been facade and the real Myerson had been a man who only took real pleasure in the suffering of others. He’d had fits of terrible depression throughout the years I’d known him. Tension and anxiety and inadequacy had characterized his life and suicide was not out of character for him, nor was his final parting shot — the attempt to frame his most intimate enemy for his own murder. That was what they were thinking, Grebe and his men.

Grebe said, “We’ll take it under advisement, Charlie. Stick close to the shop until we let you know what’s next, all right?”

In Myerson’s office Joe Cutter and I shared out a brown-bagged lunch of liverwurst-on-ryes. Joe’s teeth crunched a pickle. “You didn’t prove the case for the defense,” he said, “but at least you cast a reasonable doubt on the prosecution’s case. But they’re going to put you out to pasture all the same, you know. Gold watch and a pension. I wouldn’t call it a triumph.”

He looked up then, suddenly angry. “You deserve better, Charlie. I hate to see it end this way.”

I gave him a smile. “It won’t. This is not Charlie’s last caper.”

“Say again?”

“We’ll never know whether I was right or wrong, will we. Not until we get the truth out of Mikhail Yaskov.”

He went completely still, fingers poised on the pickle. “What?”

I said, “Yaskov’s the only one who knows, Joe.”

“Come on. You’re not going after Yaskov. On your own? Behind the Iron Curtain? At your age? Charlie, you can’t be serious.”

I grinned, though. “I guess I can.”