The Fool's Run

CHAPTER 6

The Whitemark job, if I took it, would be the first time I worked with a team. Teams are bad news; if a team is tracked and caught, there's always the possibility that a teammate will turn. The police have powerful persuaders; talk can get you a free ticket out of jail; silence can buy you five to ten, if another player talks first.

LuEllen was a solid choice. She was cool, action-oriented, decisive. A pro. She methodically calculated the possibilities and consequences of her work. She had rehearsed what she would do in virtually any situation. She didn't have to rationalize what she was doing. She knew she was a thief; she focused on being a good one.

Dace was a riskier proposition. He was good at what he did, but he lived on dreams. Dreamers lose track of what's going on around them; dreamers try to outrun bullets and outshoot cops. They move from one act to the next with no assessment of consequences. In the phony story that killed him at the Post, Dace never stopped to think, "What if these people are wrong? What if this is all bullshit?" He had fame at his fingertips. He was hot. He was on a roll. He knew he was right. A phone call might have saved him.

He had some problems, but I would take him anyway. He would not get a lot of pressure; he would mostly do paperwork. I also chose him for one of the oldest and least honored of reasons among thieves. He was available.

When I got back to St. Paul the computer was signaling that it had been accessed. Bobby. I dumped the file to the printer, and twenty feet of paper spewed out. With the exception of a few things pilfered from the Anshiser computers, it had all come from public databases. Most of it had been published in various magazines and newspapers.

Anshiser was a tough guy, Bobby's report said, but he'd gotten that way on his own. He'd never had to fight, never been on the streets, never been poor. His father was a German immigrant who started out at the turn of the century collecting scrap metal in a horse-drawn wagon. He wound up as the owner of the biggest junkyards in Chicago, a couple of steel reprocessing mills, and a small airplane company that he let his son play with. There was nothing about the way he'd jumped from wagon to steel mill, but it wasn't important. The old man had been dead for more than forty years.

World War II turned the airplane company, which he had given to his son, into a defense industry. Rudy Anshiser came out of the war with more money than the old man. When the war ended, Anshiser moved into the service fields, the hotels, the vending companies, the restaurant franchises. He made no movies, never bought a sports franchise.

His wife died in the early seventies, and he never remarried. In the past few years, as he became richer and richer, he grew more and more reclusive. Not a Howard Hughes exactly, but he seldom left his Chicago mansion.

There was more biography, including information on his wife and children. The wife had been a big benefactor of the Chicago Institute of Arts. The children kept every nickel they could lay their hands on, and spent most of their days in warmer climates.

Anshiser's company computers had routine defense industry security, Bobby said. He had gone in for a look around but had found nothing that interested him. It was all design work and perhaps a million pages of clerical records and correspondence. He did find references to Anshiser's accounting company, stumbling onto the records of traffic between the company's computer and that of the accountants.

Naturally, he followed up, tapping into the accountants' computer. Way down in the database Bobby found a private file that detailed Anshiser's cash gifts to the president and dozens of other working politicians. If you were given to tsk-tsk-ing, this would be an occasion. The president, as a Midwestern senator, had built an image as the plain-talking, square-dealing conscience of the Senate. So he took twenty thousand dollars in a brown paper bag in a Ramada Inn in Des Moines? Tsk-tsk. I carefully tucked away that portion of the printout.

There was also a report on Maggie. She was not quite as advertised. Before the hitch at the University of Chicago, she'd gone to a bad public high school in a Pennsylvania steel town. Her daddy worked at the mill before he disappeared altogether, leaving Maggie and her mother to get along as best they could. After high school, she worked for two years with an Indianapolis accounting firm, and then headed for the university. One of the partners in the accounting firm paid the ticket, at least for the first four years.

After that, she was hooked up with an economics professor, and then with Anshiser. She was not a secretary, except in the old-fashioned British sense. On two different occasions, she'd been dispatched to straighten out troubled companies. She had temporarily been the president of the vending subsidiary, and when she had it running right, interviewed and picked her own replacement. She also ran a trash-hauling company during an Arizona jurisdictional war, and won the war outright. She did it, if Bobby's reports were correct, in a little more than three months.

There were problems in that Arizona garbage gig, trucks burned, tires slashed, gas tanks blown up. Will see if can find more, but not much around except newspapers.

While Maggie was getting noticed in the business press, Dillon was the invisible man. There was nothing on him except credit reports and a few citations to articles he'd written for professional library magazines. The credit reports said he was a millionaire in his own right. There was a note that said he collected Japanese netsukes.

I read Bobby's Anshiser material and reread Dillon's Whitemark report, sitting in a comfortable leather chair with a light over my shoulder, my feet on a hassock, looking out over the river in the darkness. I needed to think. It might be impossible to slow down Whitemark without attracting an awful lot of attention from the wrong kind of people. But the money.

I spent the rest of the week painting, fishing on the St. Croix River, and working out at the dojo. I read Dillon's report so often that I could recite it by heart. LuEllen called twice with questions, Dace twice more. They were ready to sign up.

At eight o'clock in the morning, six days after the flight to Chicago, I walked up the hill to the dojo. The first classes were at noon, but the sensei did office work in the morning. He came to the outer door when I knocked, raised his eyebrows when he saw who it was, and let me in without a word. I spent two hours on the vacant hardwood floor, working on a formal exercise called a kata. I know twenty of them, more or less. I had been working on this one, sochin, for six months.

A kata can really cool out the mind. When you do a kata right, the surface of the brain, the intellectual stuff, turns off. The action is all down in the lizard part, where reflexes and instincts are paramount.

The Anshiser job was intriguing. The money was a big factor, no denying it. It would buy a certain kind of freedom, a powerfully attractive freedom. But that wasn't the only motivating factor of the proposition.

Beyond the money was the game. This was a big target, with heavy players. Could I take Whitemark out? I didn't know. Maybe. If I won, I took a major prize. If I lost, it might be prison. Interesting stakes.

To tell the truth, I didn't much care what happened to Whitemark, any more than I'd been impressed with Anshiser's talk of people losing their jobs if Whitemark won the competition.

I had spent one and two-thirds military tours in Vietnam. I could remember running down a game trail on the border between South Vietnam and Laos. Two Hmong were up ahead of me, one of them, with a stomach wound, riding his buddy's back. An NVA hunter-killer team was on our ass, and I was screaming for help on the radio. The radio kept cutting out. I thought it might be the tape antenna I had twisted down my pack straps, but I was not inclined to stop and unfold the whip and try that one. The NVA team was too close and the whip rattles through the overhead when you run.

Because trees and ground contour and everything else can affect radio transmissions, I'd stop at high points and clearings to call. And since they were high points and clearings, I'd drop down on my belly to do it and the radio's transmitter would cut out. The radio worked earlier in the run, and I could receive. The choppers were calling, "Say again, Echo, say again" but everything I transmitted was broken up and unintelligible.

Things were looking so bad that I started calling on the run, and I found that, as long as I was bolt upright, the radio worked. It didn't make sense. With the NVAs maybe a half mile back, we climbed a small knoll beside a burned-out village, popped some smoke, and got a pickup. When the chopper was away, and a few minutes after the Hmong died of his stomach wounds, I pried the back off the radio with a knife and looked inside.

Spare change. The asshole who did the final assembly left two dimes and a penny inside the protective box. Every time I went down, the penny skidded out on an electronics board and shorted it out. When I stood up, the penny fell into the bottom of the box, and the radio worked.

There are more stories like that, hundreds of them. Everybody in ' Nam had a story about the stuff we worked with, and the stuff we ate. The gear that rotted, the mortar rounds that fell short, the early Ml6s that jammed in firefights, the C-rations that included four cans of limas and ham and nothing else but a pack of Lucky Strike Greens, which had been manufactured in World War II.

When I saw that loose change rattling around in the radio, I decided the whole damn defense industry could take a flying leap. I haven't changed my mind.

All this cooked down in the lizard brain while I worked through the kata, through the difficult stances, the slow pressing moves, and the impossible sidekicks. When I finished I was sweating hard. The sensei, who looked in from time to time, said with hard work I should have it under control in two or three more years. In another sport, the comment might have been sarcastic. Not in Shotokan. He was absolutely sincere. It may have been the nicest thing he ever said to me.

After the workout, I hit the makiwara board fifty times with each hand, showered, walked back to the apartment. I called Weenie, he called LuEllen, and she called back five minutes later and signed up. I called Dace, and he was ready to go. Then I called Anshiser and told him I'd take the job.

"With one more condition."

"What?" he asked.

"I write the contract. You sign it and fingerprint it, and I stash it. It will be straightforward and incriminating. No wherefores or parties of the second part. It might not be binding in court, but it will bind your ass if you leave us stranded out there."

"Agreed."

"I'll there tomorrow. I'll want the first million. I'll want it early enough to get to a bank."

"Make it about one o'clock at the house. It'll take the morning to get it together," he said.

What?

I'm moving. Don't dump to apartment. I'll call. OK?

Ok. Got about 70 names/addresses/telephones for Whitemark execs who may use home terminals. Goes slow getting positives on addresses, confirming computers.

How long to finish?

Tomorrow.

Good. Money OK?

So far charged $2,250.

There's more if you need it.

OK/Goodbye.

It took a good part of the day to close the apartment down. I dumped the garbage, cleaned out the refrigerator, and put together a basic watercolor kit for road work. Emily agreed to take care of the cat and the Whistler and to pick up mail and pay utility bills. I gave her an envelope full of cash to cover it.

Before leaving, I spread the cards again. The Wheel of Fortune, reversed, was dominant. That told me nothing. I knew that.

Just after dark, I rolled onto Interstate 94 in my two-year-old Oldsmobile. It's a big, clumsy car with lots of power, comfortable seats, and a large trunk where eye-catching gear-terminals, printers, cameras, painting equipment-can be stashed out of sight. I tuned in WLS, and let the fifty thousand clear-channel watts of rock 'n' roll suck me down the highway toward Chicago.