The Green Eagle Score

10

Dr Godden stood in the doorway, watched Ellen Fusco go out through the outer office, and then motioned to the slender young man on the Naugahyde sofa to come in.

The young man, whose face was covered with acne, got to his feet, said nastily, “Ralph’s late again,” and sauntered into the inner office. He sat on the sofa there, spread his legs out, folded his arms and said, “Ralph’s always late.”

Dr Godden shut the door, controlled his impulse to speak harshly, and went over to sit in his accustomed chair at the end of the sofa. “That’s a problem of Ralph’s,” he said. “Perhaps after a while he’ll get over it.”

“Soon everyone will be perfect,” said the young man. He always strove for sarcasm but never attained anything other than petulance.

His name was Roger St Cloud, he was twenty-two years old, militarily unsuitable because of some problem with his inner ear, the only son of well-to-do parents—his father had a controlling interest in Monequois First Savings—and a classic bundle of insecurities and neuroses masked by a juvenile nastiness of manner. The clothing he wore—sneakers without socks, filthy chinos, a ratty turtleneck sweater—was intended to infuriate his parents, and it succeeded. It was the positive relish with which Roger’s parents rose to every bait the boy tossed them that made Dr Godden’s work so much more necessary and at the same time so much more difficult. If he could get the parents in here for regular treatments it might have some good effect on the son, but of course they’d never agree to anything like that.

Well, for the purpose at hand what was needed was not the parents but the son. Dr Godden said, out of the sense of duty that had been troubling him of late, “While we wait for Ralph, is there anything you’d like to talk about?”

Roger shrugged carelessly, which always meant yes, always meant there was something he felt about so strongly that the feeling embarrassed him and therefore had to be denied. “Had another dream,” he said.

“The Dragon?” That was the dream about his mother.

“No, none of the usual. A new one.”

“Ah? What was it?”

“I was walking down a rifle barrel. It was like a tunnel, you know? But it was a rifle barrel, and I was walking toward the bullets. I could look back the other way and see daylight at the hole. It was very realistic, with the shiny metal color and everything. It was cold in there. Then I looked back and there was an eye down at the far end looking at me. It was my father, and he said, ‘You’ll never get away.’ But he was big, he was normal size for the rifle, so he couldn’t get at me. But he kept looking in, his eye there, and I shouted, ‘Get out of the way! You’ll be killed when the gun goes off!’ But he wouldn’t believe me. Then there was a boom, like an explosion. Not like a rifle shot at all. A real explosion. And I looked and there was a bullet coming toward me. It looked like a train in a tunnel, except it filled it all the way around, there wasn’t any place to squeeze in and let it go by. And the front was all fat and squashed. I started running away, but I was slow, it turned slow-motion, you know, the way they do. But the bullet was slow, too, it was just behind me but it couldn’t catch up. And my father’s eye was still up at the other end, he wouldn’t get out of the way. I kept hollering at him, but he wouldn’t get out of the way.”

In the course of telling all this, Roger’s voice had lost its usual whine, his expression had calmed, and he had shown briefly who it was he might have been if things had been different. But now his face twisted back into its usual expression, the whine came into his voice again, and he shrugged negligently, saying, “That’s when I woke up.”

”Not hard to interpret, that dream,” Dr Godden suggested.

“Easy. I’m afraid of getting caught and I’m afraid of getting killed.”

“And you’re also afraid that if you do get caught your disgrace will also ruin your father.” Roger shrugged.

The door burst open and Ralph lumbered in. A tall, heavyset, very strong man of thirty-two, he gave an appearance of flabbiness and weakness that was totally misleading. His strength was hampered by clumsiness, his appearance altered by the way he stooped and shambled, but within the self-negating mannerisms was a strong and capable body waiting to be unleashed.

“I ran,” Ralph said, panting, and thudded over to drop heavily onto the sofa beside Roger.

“You always run,” Roger commented.

Ralph never took offense at Roger’s comments. Why should he, when he believed he deserved them? Ralph believed that he was stupid, and that stupidity was a crime. Any asset he might have, such as a strong body or a handsome face, had to be denied because it would be improper for him to enjoy anything while still committing the crime of stupidity. What had driven Ralph to Dr Godden was a girl friend who had made it a condition of their continued relationship. but what had driven him to the set of mind that he lived by Dr Godden hadn’t as yet been able to learn. It was somewhere in the early years, and Ralph’s blankness on that period was itself a strong indication that Dr Godden was on the right track.

Now, Ralph’s reply to Roger was only a sheepish grinning, “I’m always late.” Then he sat there and panted.

Dr Godden looked at them, his assistants, and he found himself envying the man Ellen knew as Parker. When Parker made a plan he knew the parts of it would be carried out by professionals, solid reliable men who did this sort of thing for a living. Dr Godden would have preferred to work with professionals himself, but according to Ellen these people did have loyalty among themselves and in the normal way of things wouldn’t steal from one another. Honor among thieves apparently did exist after all.

So it was Roger and Ralph. Dr Godden had gone through the list of his patients, had sounded a few of them out very gently and obliquely, and it had come down at last to Roger and Ralph.

Roger had been easy to convince; perhaps, from the sound of last night’s dream, he’d been too easy. But if Roger had any hidden doubts or apprehensions, Dr Godden prided himself he’d be able to contain them at least until the night’s work was over. Ralph, burly and cumbersome and self-doubting, had taken longer to persuade, but in the end his trust for Dr Godden had swung it, and now he was committed without question.

The same basic argument had been used on both of them; it would be therapy. To Ralph: “Here’s a chance to prove you are capable after all. With this accomplishment behind you, there’s no telling how much we’ll be able to unlock, how much more of you we’ll be able to free.” And to Roger: “You’ll never find a better opportunity to express all your independence and revolt at once. Do this, act out all your aggressions and resentments in this one action, do it successfully, and you’ll be well on your way to the independence we both know you need for self-fulfillment.”

Dr Godden’s own reasons were more mundane; he needed money. With a rapacious ex-wife bleeding him white for alimony and child support payments, with a second wife who didn’t know the meaning of the word economy, and with Mary Beth—a patient now become mistress—becoming more expensive every month, Dr Godden had been teetering at the brink of financial chaos for over a year now. And to top it off this man Nolan had reappeared, demanding money to keep his mouth shut, threatening to open up that business in New York again, to let the local medical society know his credentials weren’t entirely in order.

Fred Godden never intended to get into trouble or to break the law, things just happened around him. Like California, where he’d started out and where the brother-in-law of a patient had gotten him involved in that abortion business. He himself had performed no abortions, he’d only served as a middleman, but when that one girl died the investigation dragged in a lot of wriggling fish, Dr Fred Godden among them. The authorities had never quite accepted the idea that the dead girl—and three others they’d found—had all coincidentally come to him as psychiatric patients shortly before their abortions, but they hadn’t been able to prove anything. Still, it had seemed wisest to leave California, particularly since his first wife had chosen the blow-up as an excuse to divorce him, just as though it hadn’t been her free-spending that had driven him into the racket in the first place.

In New York he had developed a new practice and a new wife, but his taste in women seemed doomed not to change, and wife number two spent just as frantically as had wife number one, so when one of his patients came up with the drug suggestion he was ready for it.

How did they know, that’s what bothered him, how did these people always know he’d be open to their suggestions, weak enough to agree, to lend his respectable facade to their schemes. He’d studied his face in the bathroom mirror more than once, and as far as he could see he didn’t look shady. And he’d heard tape recordings of his voice; and he didn’t sound shady. So how did they know?

They knew, that’s all. As a doctor, he could get hold of drugs, especially the new chemicals, the psychedelics. As a doctor specializing in psychoanalysis, his cover was perfect for the people who needed someone to act as a source of supply and a base for distribution. And if one of the shuffling bearded oddballs who’d come to him for the yellow capsules hadn’t turned out to be a policeman, one of the New York City Police Department undercover narcotics men, he might still be there, in New York City, with the lucrative practice and the even more lucrative sideline, instead of here in this sinkhole.

He’d gotten out of it in New York, too, though he’d spent nine days in jail, in the Tombs, and had come out of it stripped of his credentials and legal permission to operate either as a doctor or an analyst. But how else could he made a living? That was why he’d moved up to this godforsaken area, where a man’s bona fides were unlikely to be very closely scrutinized, but where the number of patients—and their ability to pay—was depressingly low.

And then Nolan had showed up. One of the buyers back in New York, Nolan had known everything about Dr Godden’s connection with the gang, and now here he was in Monequois, demanding money as the price of his silence. How Nolan had found him Dr Godden didn’t know, any more than he had known at first where he could possibly find the money to pay him.

But hard on the heels of Nolan had come the sudden revelation from Ellen Fusco, and all at once it had seemed to Dr Godden that there was a way out after all, that he could see daylight at the end of the tunnel.

What he would do after tonight he himself wasn’t entirely sure. Would he merely pay off Nolan and all his outstanding debts, then tuck the rest away for the next crisis? Or would he pack his bags and leave the whole mess, start again somewhere else under another name, leave wives and children and mistresses and blackmailer and all? If that was what he wanted, there’d be money enough. Ralph and Roger, not having been told the true scope of the affair, were content to be receiving ten thousand dollars each. That meant almost the whole thing for Dr Godden, estimated by Ellen Fusco at four hundred thousand dollars.

Four hundred thousand dollars. To tackle people like Parker and Fusco and Devers and the others Ellen had told him about, to risk the precarious balance he now had, to take a chance on using these two poor incompetents, it was all worth it for four hundred thousand dollars.

He had thought about it often. He well knew the danger in seeking the Holy Grail, he’d seen it frequently enough in his patients. “If only X happens, everything will be all right” The belief in the easy one-shot panacea more frequently led to disaster than salvation. So he couldn’t allow himself to think of it in all-encompassing terms. Even with the four hundred thousand in his hands, he would still be Fred Godden, Dr Fred Godden, with a shady past and a penny-ante practice, with a wife and an ex-wife and a mistress and a certain bleak awareness of his own tendency toward erratic behavior when it came to women, and with a history of bad errors of judgment leading him into trouble. Nothing would change after tonight except his financial status. He would be wealthy, but he would still be the same man.

Knowing that, being sure not to forget it, he had studied the proposition, the possibilities, the dangers, the rewards, and at last he had made up his mind. An opportunity like this wouldn’t be coming his way twice. He’d be a fool to let this one slip by. Tonight.

Dr Godden looked at Roger and Ralph. His mob. They would have to do.

He took a deep breath, “I taped Mrs Fusco’s session just now,” he said. “She’s given us their plans from beginning to end. We’ll listen to them first, and then go over our own plans once more.”

Ralph and Roger looked alert, Dr Godden pressed the switch and the voice of Ellen Fusco, faintly metallic, began once more to drone.