The Blackbird

Two

“... when he wakes up.”

“He is awake,” Grofield said, and was so surprised to hear himself speak he opened his eyes.

Hospital. Himself in bed. Two thin thirtyish men in dark business suits standing at the foot of the bed, their heads turning to look at him. “Well, well,” one of them said. “The sleeper wakes.”

“Have you been listening?” the other one asked. “Or do we have to fill you in?”

Grofield had been filling himself in, remembering the holdup, the getaway, Laufman going into panic, the car rolling over and over, and then the abrupt lights out. And now? He was in a hospital, those two guys weren’t doctors, the future didn’t look bright. He looked at them standing there and said, “You’re cops.”

“Not exactly,” the second one said. He came around the foot of the bed and sat down in the chair to Grofield’s left. At the same time, the first one moved farther away, over to the door, and stood there casually, arms folded, back against the door.

Grofield found it painful to turn his head and dizzying to look at the seated one through his nose, so he shut the off eye and said, “Nobody’s not exactly a cop. Not exactly means not local.”

The seated one smiled. “Very good, Mr. Grofield,” he said.

Grofield squinted the open eye. “You have my name.”

“We have you cold, my friend. Name, prints, history, everything. You’ve been a lucky boy up till now.”

“That was the first time I was ever involved in anything like that,” Grofield lied.

The other’s smile turned sardonic. “Not likely,” he said. “Laufman is a pro. The one who got away is a pro. They brought in an amateur to help out? Not likely.

So Parker had gotten away. Grofield said, “With or without the money?”

“What?”

“Somebody got away. With or without the money?”

The one at the door barked, but when Grofield looked at him in astonishment he saw the bark had been intended as a laugh. The barker said, “He’d like to go collect his share.”

“A workman wants his wages,” Grofield said. “I don’t suppose there’s any point my claiming I was kidnapped by those two and forced to help them.”

“Oh, go ahead,” said the seated one. “But not with us, we don’t particularly care about the robbery.”

Painful or not, Grofield turned his head and put two eyes to work studying the guy seated there. He said, “Insurance dicks?”

The barker barked again, and the seated one said, “We work for your government, Mr. Grofield. You can think of us as civil servants.”

“FBI.”

“Hardly.”

“Why hardly? What else is there besides the FBI?”

“Your government has many arms,” the seated one said, “each devoted to aid and protect you in its own way.”

The room door opened, bumping the barker, who looked annoyed. A cop came in, burly and middle-aged, in uniform, with a hatbrim full of fruit salad. An important cop, an inspector or some such. He didn’t quite salute, but stood poised and hesitant in the doorway, like a waiter anticipating a large tip. “Just wondering how you gentlemen are coming along,” he said, smiling with curiosity and eagerness to please.

“We’re doing fine,” said the barker. “We’ll be out in just a few minutes.”

“Take your time, take your time.” The cop glanced at Grofield in the bed, and for just a second his expression went kaleidoscopic, as though he didn’t know what his attitude toward Grofield was supposed to be. It was impossible to read anything in the gyrations of his face except possibly that he had gone temporarily insane.

“Thank you for your interest, Captain,” the seated one said, without smiling. It was a clear-cut dismissal, and the cop understood it. He began nodding and nodding, his waiter’s smile flashing on and off as he said, “Well then, I’ll... ” Still nodding, not finishing the sentence, he backed out and shut the door.

The seated one said, “Is there any way to lock that?”

The barker studied the knob. “Not from this side. But I doubt he’ll be back.”

“We’ll make it fast,” the seated one said, and looked back at Grofield. He said, “I want straight answers to a couple of questions. Don’t worry about self-incrimination, this is between you and us.”

“Go ahead and ask,” Grofield said. “I can always say no.”

“Tell me what you know about General Luis Pozos.”

Grofield looked at him in surprise. “Pozos? What’s he got to do with anything?”

“We told you our interest wasn’t the robbery. Tell me about Pozos.”

“He’s president of some country in Latin America. Guerrero.”

“Do you know him personally?”

“In a way.”

“What way?”

“I saved his life one time. Not on purpose.”

“You’ve been a guest on his yacht?”

Grofield nodded, which was also painful. His skull seemed to have been removed and replaced with sandpaper, so that he was all right when he lay still but moving made things scrape. So he stopped nodding and said, “That was after I saved his life. Some people were going to kill him, and I ran into a girl who knew about it, and we went and broke it up.”

“You aren’t in contact with him now?”

Grofield restrained himself from shaking his head. “No,” he said. “We don’t travel in the same circles.”

“Have you ever been employed by him?”

“No.”

“What is your feeling about him?”

“I don’t have one.”

“You must have some feeling.”

“I wouldn’t want him to marry my sister.”

The barker barked. The seated one smiled and said, “All right, what about a man named Onum Marba?”

“Can he marry my sister, is that what you want?”

“I want to know what you know about him.”

“He’s a politician from Africa. I forget the name of his country.”

“Undurwa,” the seated one said, with the accent on the middle syllable.

“Right. Makes me think of underwear.”

The seated one made an impatient face. “Does it,” he said. “Tell me about Marba.”

“I never saved his life. He and I were houseguests together at a place in Puerto Rico last year, that’s all.”

“You never worked for him.”

“No. And I’m not in contact with him now.”

“And your feeling about him?”

“He’s a sharp cookie. He could marry my sister.”

The seated one nodded and sat back and looked at the barker. “What do you think?”

The barker studied Grofield, who met his eye and took the brief time out to try to figure out what the heck was going on. He was a professional thief — as a means of supporting himself in the unrewarding vocation of professional actor, self-limited to the legitimate stage — and after twelve years of quiet success at his two crafts disaster had befallen. He’d appeared in a turkey, the show had folded on the road, but it looked like it would be a long, long time before he would again be, in the actor’s phrase, at liberty.

But what had General Pozos from Latin America and Onum Marba from Africa to do with a busted armored car heist in a northern American city? And what had these government employees who were not with the FBI and who didn’t care about the robbery to do with Alan Grofield?

The barker finished his inspection of Grofield before Grofield finished his inspection of the situation. He looked away from Grofield and nodded, saying, “Try him.”

“Right.” The seated one faced Grofield again. He said, “We’re going to offer you a deal, and you can take it or leave it, but you’ll have to decide right now.”

“A deal? I’ll take it.”

The seated one said, “Listen to it first.”

“Does it involve me going to jail?”

“Just listen,” the seated one said. “We can arrange to change your status in the robbery from participant to witness. You’ll sign a statement, and that will be the end of it.”

Grofield said, “I’m trying to think what I have that I want badly enough to keep so you’ll trade all that for it, and I don’t come up with anything.”

The barker said, “How’s about your life?”

Grofield looked at him without moving his head. “You want me to kill myself? No deal.”

It was the seated one who answered, saying, “What we want you to do will maybe risk your life. We can’t know ahead of time.”

Grofield looked at the two faces, then at the door the captain of police had come so obsequiously through just a minute ago, and said, “I’m getting a glimmering. It’s secret agent time, espionage, all that Technicolor jazz. You birds are CIA.”

The seated one made a pouting face, and the barker said, “Sometimes I can’t stand it. CIA, CIA, CIA. Don’t people realize their government has some secret intelligence organizations?”

The seated one told him, “I had an uncle in the Treasury. People had him down for an FBI man so damn much he took an early retirement.”

Grofield said, “I didn’t mean to offend you.”

“That’s all right,” the seated one said. “The general public likes things clear-cut, that’s all, just a few simple organizations. Like remember how happy everybody was when the Cosa Nostra first came out?”

“Like chlorophyll,” the barker said. “The public loves brand names.”

“And you people,” Grofield said, “are brand X, is that it?”

“A perfect description,” the seated one said cheerfully. “We’re brand X, that’s it to the life.” He turned to the barker, saying, “Huh, Charlie? Is that nice?”

“Our friend has a way with words,” the barker said.

The seated one smiled at Grofield, pleased with him, then grew serious again. “All right,” he said. “The point is, brand X wants you to work for them. It may be dangerous, it may not, we don’t know. If you agree, and if you do the job, this little jam you’re in now is over and forgotten. If you refuse, or if you agree and then try to run out on us, we’ll drop you back into the frying pan.”

“In other words, you’re offering me the fire.”

“Maybe. We don’t know for sure.”

“What are the details?”

The seated one shook his head, smiling sadly. “Sorry. You can’t open this package till after you accept delivery.”

“Because,” Grofield said unhappily, “if I refuse, you don’t want me to know too much. Is that it?”

“Right on the money.”

“And how long do I have to make up my mind?”

“Take a full minute, if you want.”

“You’re a sport,” Grofield said. “What about Laufman, does he get the same deal?”

“No. Just you.”

“He might make unhappy noises at his trial, if I’m not there.”

“He isn’t expected to live.” At Grofield’s look, he went on, “His doing, not ours. He punctured a lung, among other things.”

The barker — Charlie — said, “Better make up your mind, Grofield, I hear our friends getting impatient in the hall.”

“You didn’t ask me if I was a patriot,” Grofield reminded him.

The seated one said, “It didn’t seem a relevant question. Yes or no?”

“You know it’s yes, damn it. If you didn’t know it, you wouldn’t have asked.”

The seated one smiled and stood. “We’ll see you when the doctors say you’re healthy,” he said. “Do they call you Al or Alan?”

“Alan.”

“I’m Ken, that’s Charlie. See you soon.”

“The minutes will seem like hours,” Grofield said.

They were moving toward the door, but Ken turned back to say, “There is a certain amount of urgency involved. If you aren’t ready to go in time for us to use you, naturally the deal is off.” He smiled cheerily. “Get well soon,” he said.