The Green Ripper

MacDonald, John D - Travis McGee 18 - The Green Ripper

To Maxwell P. Wilkinson l Representative and FriendI

Fanaticism is described as redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim.

George Santayana

Meyer came aboard The Busted Flush on a dark, wet, windy Friday afternoon in early December. I had not seen him in nearly two months. He looked worn and tired, and he had faded to an indoor pallor. He shucked his rain jacket and sat heavily in the biggest chair and said he wouldn't mind at all if I offered him maybe a little bourbon, one rock, a dollop of water.

"Where's Gretel?" he asked as I handed him his dnnk.

"Moved out," I said. He looked so dismayed I quickly added that she had found herself a job, finally, way the hell and gone over in the suburb of Tamarac, west of North Lauderdale and west of the Tumpike, out in the area of the shiny new developments and shopping plazas, near University Community Hospital and Timber Run Golf Club. "Couldn't get any farther away and still be in the same metropolitan area. It tales at least form minutes to drive over there."

"Doing what?"

'1he outfit is called, excuse the expression, Bonnie Brae. It is a combination fat farm, tennis club, and real estate development. She works in the office, lives in one of the model houses, gives tennis lessons to the littlies, exercise classes for the baffles, and is becoming indispensable. She can tell you all about it. She'll be here about six or six thirty."

"I was afraid you two had split."

"No chance. I'm not going to let that one get away."

"Splendid judgment."

"It's a phase, Meyer. She did hard time in a bad marriage and says it stunted her. She has to make it on her own, she says, to become a complete person, and when she is, then we can think about what kind of arrangement we're going to have."

"Makes a certain amount of sense."

"Not to me."

"But you're not... being derisive or patronizing?"

"Hell, no. I am being full of understanding, and all that."

I didn't want to try to tell him what a vacuum she left when she packed and moved out. The houseboat was dismally empty. When I woke up, if I wanted to hear clinking sounds from the galley, I had to go make them myself. The winter boats were beginning to come down, filling up the empty berths, spewing out their slender and elegant ladies to walk the area, shopping and smiling, providing what in times past had been like one of those commercial hatcheries where you pay a fee and catch your own trout and take it home to cook. But Grets had made all the pretty ladies look brittle, bloodless, and tasteless, and made the time without her seem leaden and endless.

In another season there were the girls of summer, robust and playful in their sandy ways, and now here were the winter ones, with cool surmise in the tended eye, fragrant and speculative, strolling and shopping, sailing and tanning, then making their night music and night scent, searching for something they could not quite name, but would know once they found it.

"How did the conference go?" I asked.

He shook a weary head. "These are bad days for an economist, my friend. We have gone past the frontiers of theory. There is nothing left but one huge ugly fact."

"Which is?"

"There is a debt of perhaps two trillion dollars out there, owed by governments to governments, by governments to banks, and there is not one chance

The Green Ripper in hell it can ever be paid back. There is not enough productive capacity in He world, plus enough raw materials, to provide maintenance of plant plus enough overage even to keep up with the mounting interest."

"What happens? It gets written off?"

He looked at me with a pitying expression. "All the major world currencies will collapse. Trade will cease. Without trade, without the mechanical-scientific apparatus running, the planet won't support its four billion people, or perhaps even half that. Agribusiness feeds the world. Hydrocarbon utilization heats and houses and clothes the people. There will be fear, hate, anger, death. The new barbarism. Thae will be plague and poison. And then the new Dark Ages."

"Should I pack?"

"Go ahead. Scoff. What the sane people and sane governments are trying to do is scuffle a little more breathing space, a little more time, before the collapse."

"How much time have we got?"

'of nobody pushes the wrong-button or puts a bomb under the wrong castle, I would give us five more years at worst, twelve at best. What is triggering it is the crisis of reduced expectations. All over the world people are suddenly coming to realize that their children and grandchildren are going to have it worse than they did, that the trend line is down. So they want to blame somebody. They want to hoot and holler in the streets and burn something down."

'whose side are you on?"

"I'm one of the scufflers. Cut and paste. FLX the world with paper clips and rubber bands."

"Are you trying to depress me, old buddy?"

"On Pearl Harbor Day?"

"So it is."

"And with each passing year it is going to seem ever more quaint, the little tin airplanes bombing the sleepy iron giants."

"There you go again."

He yawned and I noticed again how worn he looked. The international conference had been held in Zurich. There had been high hopes the news- papers said for a solution to the currency problems, but as it went on and on and on, interest could not be sustained, nor could hope.

"How was the trip back, Meyer?"

'] was too sound asleep to notice."

'~id you all just sit around and read papers to each other?"

"There was some of that. Yes. But most of it was workshop, computer analysis. Peed all the known, unchangeable factors into the program, and then add the ones that can be changed, predicating inter- dependence, making the variations according to a pattern, and analyzing the shape of the world that emerges, each one a computer model. Very bright young specialists assisted. We came out all too

The Green Ripper close to the doom anticipated by the Club of Rome, no matter how we switched the data around. It comes down to this, Travis there are too many mouths to feed. One million three hundred thousand more every week! And of all people who have ever been alive on Earth, more than half are living right now. We are gnawing the planet bare, and technology can't keep pace with need."

I had never seen him more serious, or more depressed. I fixed him a fresh drink when Gretel arrived. I met her, and after the welcome lass, she looked over my shoulder and gave a whoop of surprise and pleasure at seeing Meyer. She thrust me aside and ran into his delighted bear hug. Then she held him off at arm's long& and tilted her head to give him her brown-eyed measuring stare.

'Lou look awful!" she said. Thou look lice you just got out of jail."

"Fairly good guess. And you look fantastic, Gretel.,'

Yt goes wi& the job. I got sort of sloppy living on this barge, eating too much and drinking too much Today I jogged wi& four sets of raffles.. I must have done seven miles. I've got the greatest new job."

"Travis was telling me about it."

"You'll have to come out and let me show you around." Quite suddenly the enthusiasm had faded out of her voice. I couldn't imagine why. She gave me a quick look and looked away, and went to the galley to fix herself one of her vegetable juice cocktails.

I followed her and said, "Is something wrong out there?"

"No. Of course not."

"Hey, Grets. This here is me. Asking."

HI hear you asking. I think I might fall right off the wagon right now. I'm down to where I can spare a few pounds. Straight Boodles and rocks, okay?"

"When you come down off it, you come down a way."

She leaned against a storage locker as I fixed her drink. I looked at her, a great lithe woman who, on tiptoe, could almost look me in the eye. Thick brown sun-streaked hair, dark brown eyes, film jaw, broad mouth, high-bridged imperious nose. A woman of passion, intensity, good humor, mocking grace, and a very irritating and compelling need for total or almost total independence. During all the lazy weeks aboard The Busted Flush when, after the death of her brother in Timber Bay, I had brought her all the way around the peninsula to Fort Lauderdale, we had arrived at last at a relationship she had decided did not threaten her freedom. She was a hearty and sensuous woman, and for a long time she was suspicious and reluctant in lovemaking, apparently feeling that my in- creasing knowledge of her body's resources, its needs and rhythms and special stimuli, was some

16

Lee Green Ripper how an exercise in ownership. But after she decided to accept completely, she became herself forthright, evocative, and deliciously bawdy when the mood was upon her.

After she took a sip of her drink I put fingertips under her chin, tilted it up, kissed her gently on the lips, and then said, "Whatever it is, I would like to know. Okay? Like management trying to slip up on your blind side?"

She grinned. "That I can handle, McGee. What makes you think there's a blind side?"

"If there isn't, what are you doing here?"

She frowned into her drink. "I think P11 tell both of you. I think I could use more than one opinion."

We went back in and she sat next to Meyer on the yellow davenport. "What it is," she said, 'I think something other than what is supposed to be going on out there, is going on out there."

"Bonnie Brae is a front for something else?" I asked.

"Not really that," she said. "I mean, it's pretty big and elaborate. Mr. Ladwigg and Mr. Broffski borrowed a fantastic amount of money to buy the land. It's twelve hundred and eighty acres. There was a big stone-and-cypress house on it, and outbuildings. It was called the Cattrell place and was empty for years while the estate was being settled. They put a half-million dollars into renovating the house and some of the other buildings. And they put in roads and a sewage-treatment plant, water supply, and all that. And they fixed the old airstrip near the barns. They digging lakes, and building and selling houses, and selling building sites. We can accommodate twenty-four raffles in the main house at one time, feed them from the diet kitchen, and keep them busy. They pay twelve hundred a week, and there's a waiting list. And there's a waiting list for membership in the tennis club too. I mean, without knowing all the financial details, I'd say it's going very well. Mr. Ladwigg and Mr. Broffski have both built houses for themselves in the best part of the development, where the lots have to be two acres each, and Mr. Morse Slater, the manager, has a new house near theirs. There are twenty-five or thirty new houses occupied, and room for an awful lot more, of course. There are some staff quarters in the baclc of the main house, because it is sort of like a small hotel, or hospital. There is a nice flavor. I mean it's a good place to work. We have some laughs. People get along." Her voice trailed off and she sipped and frowned.

"And now something doesn't seem right?" Meyer asked, prompting her.

She smiled and leaned back. "Maybe I was lied to for too many years. Husband Billy was a world- champion-class liar. Brother John wasn't exactly clumsy at it."

"What's my rating?" I asked.

The Green Ripper

"All the returns aren't in. What I'm saying, maybe I get suspicious when there's no real need."

"We've got the whole evening, my dear," Meyer said. "If we're all patient, you'll probably get to the point sooner or later."

"I guess I'm dragging my feet because it sounds so weird I hate to mention it. Last week I had a batch of fatties down by the barns in the middle of the morning, making them do exercises, when a pretty little blue airplane landed on our strip. When I went back to the office, I asked Mr. Slater who had come in and he said that it was somebody to see Mr. Ladwigg, he didn't know what about. I asked because sometimes a buyer flies in, and when they buy something, it means more paperwork for me. Now we come to the coincidence part. I woke up real early the next morning. It was brisk and clear. The model house I'm living in is about a half mile from the office. A couple of days before, I lost a pin I like very much while leading a group jogging. So I put on a heavy sweater and went out to retrace our route, thinking maybe I could find it in the grass. I was over by the airstrip, searching near a patch of palmetto, when I heard a motor. For a moment I thought it was a plane, and then I stepped out almost into the path of Herman Lad- wigg's Toyota, going cross-country. It's like a Land Rover, tall and open, with winches and things, and huge tires. It's white with red trim. Mr. Ladwigg was driving, and it startled him as much as it did me, I guess. I dodged back, and I was on the passenger side of it as it went by. So the face of the man riding with Mr. Ladwigg was not more than a yard away from me. I saw him very very clearly. And I knew in that split second I had seen him be- fore. He looked right at me, and I saw the flicker of his recognition. He knew me too. But I couldn't remember where or when. All I could remember was that it had been an unpleasant experience."

"You can describe him?"

"Oh, sure. Big, but not fat. Big-boned. About forty, maybe a lithe less. Kind of a round face, with all his features sort of small and centered in the middle of all that face. Wispy blond hair cut quite short. No visible eyebrows or eyelashes. Lots and lots of pits and craters in his cheeks, from terrible acne when he was young. Little mouth, lithe pale eyes, girlish lithe nose. He was wearing a khaki jacket over a white turtleneck. He was holding onto the side of the passenger door because of the rough ride. His hands are very big and... well, brutallooking."

Meya said, ']t doesn't sound as if there could be two like that. But it's possible, of course. Maybe his change of expression was not recognition, but surprise at seeing somebody pop up like that."

"No. He knew me. Because I remembered two nights ago, in the middle of the night, where led seen him. As soon as I remembered, I knew it was the same man. Five years ago Billy's sister, my kid

The Green Ripper sister-in-law, Mitsy, disappeared. The family was frantic. She'd been in school up near San Francisco. She had just taken her things and gone away. Billy got time off from work and went up to San Francisco and nosed around and found out she had been hanging around with some kids who were connected with a religion called... damn! It will come to me."

"The Unification Church, the Moonies?" Meyer asked. She shook her head. "Hare Krishna? Scientology? Children of God? The Jesus People? The Church of Armageddon?"

She stopped him and said, '`That's close, that last one. It's like Apocalypse. Wait a minute. Apocry- pha! The Church of the Apocryphal"

"Very interesting!" Meyer said

'~Vhat's an apocrypha?" I asked.

"It's plural,": he said. "Fourteen books or chapters which are sort of an appendix to the Old Testament and are not acceptable to the establishment. Seldom printed. They are bloody, merciless, and, some say, divinely inspired. Authorship unsubstantiated. I suspect that a religion based upon them would be... severe indeed."

"A postcard finally came from Mitsy," Gretel said. "It was mailed from Ukiah, California. It was to her mother, father, her two brothers, and me. All it said was, 'Remember that I will always love you, but I will never see you again in this life.' You can imagine how that hit us ale Mitsy was such a... such a merrier little gal. Pretty and bouncy and popular. Your standard cheerleader type. No steady boyfriend. She wanted to be a social worker and work with handicapped children.

"Anyway, her father hired an investigator, and he located an encampment of the Church of the Apocrypha about twenty miles southwest of Ukiah, off in the woods. He had tried to get in to find out if Mitsy was there, but he couldn't learn a thing. Just about that time, her father my father-in- law had a stroke, a severe one. His right side was totally paralyzed, and he couldn't speak or understand what anyone said. He died of pneumonia about four months later. Billy's younger brother was working in Iran. So when we could, Billy and I drove up to the encampment, using the map the investigator had marked.

'4There were little winding roads, and finally we came to the private, no-trespassing signs he had told us about, and the wire gate across the road. A young boy came out of a lean-to. He wore a direr white smock and he was trying to grow a beard. We said we wanted to visit Miriam Howard, Mitsy Howard. He nodded and walked away up the curving road beyond the wire gate, and out of sight. We waited and waited and waited. Billy got very angry. I had to keep talking him out of going over the gate. It was over an hour before that man came down the road. That same marz. He was five years younger, of course. He wore a white tunic with a

The Green Ripper

Chinese collar, and white trousers tucked into shiny black boots. He came right to the high fence and looked us over very carefully. He completely ignored the angry questions Billy was shouting at him.

"Finally he spoke to us. There was so little movement of his lips it was as if he were a ventriloquist. He had a soft little voice. I am Brother Titus. I am an elder of the Church of the Apocryphal You are inquiring about someone we now know as Sister Aquila. She has asked me to tell you that she is quite happy here and she does not wish to see you or anyone from her previous life.'

"Billy demanded to see her. He swore at Titus. It had no effect. He said it wasn't possible, not now, not ever. She was happy in her new life, he said. Billy said he was going to see his sister Mitsy, and if it took a court order for a conservatorship, he would get it. He'd gotten that information from the investigator.

"Brother Titus thought for a little while and told us to wait. In twenty minutes a little crowd of them, about nine or ten, came down to the gate. We didn't see Brother Titus again. The people ranged in age from, I would guess, sixteen to twenty-five. Three or four girls, and the rest boys. At first we thought they had come without Mitsy, and then we recognized her. It was a shock. She had become such a worn, skinny, subdued little thing. She wore a dirty white smock and she had some kind of seri ous rash on her face and throat and arms. They looked badly chapped. The smock was too big for her. All of them had exactly the same look. It's hard to describe. Sort of bland and smug and glassy.

"They stood very close to her as she stood at the gate. She said, 'Hello, Billy. Hello, GreteL I don't know how you found me, but I'm sorry you did.' BiUy said, What have they done to you, Mitsy?' She said, 'My name is Sister Aquila now. They have made me very happy. I am full of peace and happiness and the love of God. Please don't ever try to find me again. Tell Mama and Papa Em happy here, happier than I've ever been before.' Billy said, Thou better come home. Pop has had a very bad stroke. Things are in terrible shape. We all need you.' She didn't turn a hair. She looked at him with that contented half smile and said, 'All of that is in my previous life. It has nothing to do with me now. My life is here. Go away, please. God bless you.' They all turned and went up the hid to" "ether, so close together they made each other stumble from time to time. They all had exactly that same look. It took the heart right out of Billy."

"Did you make another try?"Meyer ash

"Billy did. He went up there several weeks later, but they told him she was gong They said she had been 'called' to another place in the service of the Lord. If it wasn't for the stroke, maybe the family would have taken some kind of action through the

The Green Ripper courts, but money was scarce, and God knows Billy and I couldn't finance a court order and depro- gramming her and all that. The brother came back from Iran about six months before Billy ran out on me. Carl, his name is. He couldn't understand why we couldn't get her away from those people. He wasn't here. He couldn't know how it was. He lives in Houston now, at least he did the last I heard, and their mother lives with him and his wife."

"So you saw Brother Titus here, last week?" I said.

"Definitely. He was so... so out of context, it tools a while to remember where I'd seen him before. But I am positive. Tray, there's another thing that seems odd. After they went by me, they headed for the airstrip, and a little later the blue plane took off. I saw it take off and head west. When Mr. Ladwigg drove back home, he drove on the road. Why did he take Brother Titus on such a roundabout way? Was it because Titus didn't want to be seen by anybody?"

"Maybe he was showing him some land. Maybe the Church wants to set up an encampment here," I said.

"Where there isn't any available? That piece was sold months ago."

"To whom?" Meyer asked.

"To some kind of foreign syndicate, headquartered in Brussels. I was told they plan to put up a hotel-club where members can come for holidays in the States. They took twenty undeveloped acres over on our western boundary near the airstrip."

"For foreign members of the Church of the Apocrypha?"Meyer asked with a sweet smile.

"Oh, no!" Gretel looked horrified. "Mr. Ladwigg and Mr. Broffski and Mr. Slater would have fits. It can't be that, really. Could it, Travis? Could that creep..."

"Not at the price they're probably getting out there."

"Two hundred and twenty-five thousand. It was a special price because of no roads or water supply or sewer.''

"Maybe Brother Titus left the Church," I suggested. "Maybe he's into real estate. That has the status of a religion in south Florida"

She didn't laugh. She was scowling. 'I keep thinking of Mitsy. Her hands were grubby and her hair was caked with dirt. She had sores on her anHes. She looked exhausted. I am damn well god ing to find out exactly what that man is doing around there. And it can't be anything good."

"You two are well-matched," Meyer said. "You both have the same kind of compulsive curiosity. I will tell you what I tell Travis, my dear. Proceed with caution. The world is full of damp rocks, with some very strange creatures hiding under them."

"Herm Ladwigg is an old honey bear," she said. "He would not be involved in anything tricky or

The Green Ripper dirty. And if I can think of the right way to ask him, hell tell me what's going on."

The next time we looked at Meyer, we found he had fallen asleep in the chair. He would bitterly resent our leaving him like that, so we stirred him awake. He said he was too tired to eat, and over Gretelts protests that she could stir up something in a hurry, he went clumping on back to his stubby old cabin cruiser moored just down the pier from my slip, the John M~ryru~rd Reynes, sighing in consternation at the state of all the money in the world.

We buttoned up The Busted Flush. Gretel kicked on her shoes and hung herself around my neck and grinned into my face and said, "Well... will it be before or after the crab-meat feast I am going to fix usl"

I gave it judicious thought. "How about a little of both?"

YIow did I know you were going to say that?"

"Because I usually do."

"Shut up and deal," she whispered.

So the gusty winds of a Friday night in December came circling through the marina, grinding and tilting all the play boats and work boats around us, creaking the hulls against the fenders, clanking fit- tings against masts. While in the big bed in the master stateroom her narrowed eyes glinted in faint reflected light, my hands found the well-known slopes and lifts and hollows of her warmth and agility. We played the games of delay and anffcipaffon, of teasing and waiting, until we went past the boundaries of willed restraint and came in a mounting rush that seemed to seek an even greater closeness than the paired loins could provide. And then subsided, with the outdoor wind making breathing sounds against the superstructure of the old barge-type houseboat, and the faint swing and dip of the hull seemlug to echo, in a slower pace, the lovemaking just ended. With neither of us knowing or guessing that it was the very last night. With neither of us able to endure that knowledge had we been told.

28

2

Because Gretel had too many jobs at Bonnie Brae, she went back out Saturday morning to catch up on her desk work, driving off in the riffle Honda Civic I had helped her find and buy. It had belonged to a hairdresser at Pier 66 who had decided to marry her friend and go live in Saudi Arabia. It was pink, with a special muffler.

She planned to come in again early Saturday ever Ding and stay until Monday morning. It was a bright breezy day. My two best Finor reels were overdue for cleaning and oiling, and I had the first one all apart when Grets phoned me from work.

Her voice was hushed. "Darling, there is one hell of a mess out here. Herm is dead."

"Herm?"

"Ladwigg. Mr. Ladwigg. One of the owners."

"Heart attack?"

"They don't know yet. He's been bicycling early in the morning lately, for exercise, riding around the new roads they put in. And they found him in the middle of the road, face down, next to the bicycle. He either blacked out and the fall killed him... they just don't know yet. He was forty-six. What I wanted to say, don't expect me tonight, huh? Catherine Mrs. Ladwigg is in shock. They gave her a sedative. I'm here at the Ladwigg house trying to get in touch with their son and daughter. The son is a lawyer in Anchorage and the daughter works for the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, and I haven't got through to either of them yet. When I do, I'm going to stay here until one or both of them get here. There's nobody else to do it. Stan Broffski's wife is a total loss in a situation like this."

'avant me to come out and help you wait around?"

"That's nice of you, but no, thanks."

"Let me know when you think you'll be free, when you have an idea of the time."

"Sure. Bye, dear."

So I went back to my fish reels. It was just ten o'clock, Saturday morning, December 8. They were having their weekend in Helsinki and in Anchorage. No telling how long it would take to find either

The Green Ripper of them. In the meanwhile, poor Hermhadsuccumbed to the age of the jock. The mystique of pushing yourself past your limits. The age of shin splints, sprung knees, and new hernias. An officesoftened body in its middle years needs a long, long time to come around. Until a man can walk seven miles in two hours without blowing like a porpoise, without sweating gallons, without bumping his heart past 120, it is asinine to start jogging. Except for a few dreadful lapses which have not really gone on too long, I have stayed in shape all my life. Being in shape means knowing your body, how it feels, how it responds to this and to that, and when to stop. You develop a sixth sense about when to stop. It is not mysticism. It is brute labor, boring and demanding. Violent exercise is for children and knowledgeable jocks. Not for insurance adjustors and sales managers. They do not need to be in the shape they want to be, and could not sustain it if they could get there. Walking briskly no less than six hours a week will do it for them. The McGee System for earnest office people. I can push myself considerably further because I sense when [m getting too close to the place where something is going to pop, rip, or split.

Meyer stopped by a little while after I'd finished the reels. He said he had slept fourteen hours and still felt tired. I told him about the trouble out at Bonnie Brae, and he agreed with me that Ladwigg had probably pushed himself beyond his ability. A fall onto asphalt paving from a ten-speed bike going twenty miles an hour can easily be fatal, especially without a helmet. I doubted Ladwigg would wear a crash helmet while cruising his own development in the early hours.

Gretel phoned again at half-past noon to say she had located the son in Alaska and told him the news, and he expected to be able to get to Lauderdale late this same night.

'~You sound a little beat," I said.

"Do I? The phone has been driving me crazy. But I do feel sort of blah. As if I'm coming down with a bug."

"Can you get somebody to take over?"

'Y'm trying."

"I think I'll come on out."

'4I... I'll be glad to see you."

Meyer left. I locked up the Flush, went over to the parking area, and cranked up my ancient Rolls pickup, the electric-blue Miss Agnes. The replaced power plant yanked her along too fast for her tall antique dignity, like a dowager blown into an unwilling trot by a gale-force wind. I made a stop on Spangler and picked up a pair of quarter-pounders with cheese, on the assumption that Gretel wouldn't have had time for lunch either.

I went all the way over to the University Drive intersection and turned north past the new plazas and shopping centers, the caramel-colored condommiums, the undeveloped flatlands where the pal

The Green Ripper motto still grew, the clusters of wooden town houses with roofs cut into steep new architectural cliches to shed some unimaginable snow load. Bonnie Brae had marled their entrance with squat fat brick pil- lars on either side of their divided-lane driveway. It curved off to the right to the big parking area near the renovated Cattrell place now used as clubhouse, fat farm, and administration building. When the gusty wind slowed, there was heat in the sun. I could see people bobbing and trotting about over on the tennis courts.

I went into the foyer of the building, hoping to find somebody who would direct me to Ladwigg's new house. A man came out of a room at my right and walked up to me, hand out.

"Mr. McGee?" He was a boyish thirty-something, with apple cheeks, a bushy blond mustache, thinning blond hair carefully adjusted to hide the thinning, bow tie, gray tweed jacket with leather elbows. When I nodded he shook my hand heartily and said, 'Tm Morse Slater. Maybe Gretel has mentioned me."

"The manager, yes." He had a bumbling kind of effusiveness about him, a shoe-clerk willingness to please, which was given the lie by the ice-blue eyes, intent, aware, measuring I said, "What I want to know is how I find the ~

"Gretel told me to look out for you. I just took her up the Drive to the hospital. Got back minutes ago."

"What happened?"

"Some sort of bug, I thinlr.She seemed to be in a half faint, and she felt so hot to the touch it frightened me. So I took her right to Emergency and signed her in. They took her temperature and checked her into the hospital and began tests. A Dr. Tower seemed to be the one giving the orders. We accepted financial responsibility, of course. All our people have insurance which... but you're not interested in that. Room one thirty-three."

I think he tried to say something else, but I was already on my way. The hospital was on the same side of University Drive, and a little more than a half mile away.

I managed to talk my way to the nurses' station and then down the corridor to the room where Gretel was. It was a two-bed room with an old woman asleep and snoring by the windows, with a curtain drawn between the two beds. I pulled a straight chair close beside Gretel and took her hand. It felt dry and hot.

"What's going on?" I asked her.

Her lips were swollen and cracked, and her brown hair was damp and matted. She moistened her lips and gave me a small wry smile. Yt's one of those days," she said. "Oh, boy. I got up and busted my favorite coffee mug that you gave me. Herm Ladwigg died in the street. A bug gave me a hell of a sting in the back of the neck. Later on, when I

The Green Ripper began to feel dizzy, I fainted and fell and brolce one of the big lamps in the Ladwigg house. And here I am. It's one of those days."

"What do they say is wrong?"

'.They don't say. Fever of unknown origin. My ears are ringing so loud you should be able to hear them. I really feel weird."

"They're running tests, aren't they? They'll find out what you've got."

A little bit of a sallow blond nurse came hur~ying in. She had a fifty-year-old face and a twenty- five-year-old body. She gave me a disapproving glance, took a temperature reading with an elect Ironic gadget, then took blood pressure on the left arm, pursed her lips, came around and displaced me, and took the pressure on the other arm. She trotted out. I moved close. Gretel found my wrist with her hot dry hand and held tight. array, I feel so hot. [m burning up. I feel terrible, Trav. Terrible."

When I spoke to her again, she didn't answer. She seemed to be asleep, her eyes about one third open, breathing so rapidly and shallowly through her mouth, it scared me.

I went plunging out to find somebody and ran into a couple of orderlies pushing a stretcher. I asked them what was going on, and they said they were taking a patient named Gretel Howard to Intensive Care. Other than that, they knew nothing.

I followed along, after they had raised the bed and pulled her across onto the stretcher. They tried to keep me from getting into the elevator with her, but it didn't work. But they did stop me at the door to the Intensive Care area. I told a very large white-haired nurse that if somebody didn't come and tell me within ten minutes what was going on, I was coming through that door.

The doctor who came out said his name was Tower. Vance Tower. He led me over to some rattan chairs near a window and we sat down and he said, '] need some background here."

"What's the matter with her?"

He had taken a little Pearlcorder out of his At and put it into dictation mode. 'name, address, and occupation, please," he said, and held it up between us. They make you play their game their way, and if you want a lot of delays, just re- fuse to go along. Travis McGee. Slip F-18, Bahia Mar Marina Salvage Consultant.

"Relationship to patient?"

I hesitated, then said, "Common-law husband." After ale she had lived aboard the houseboat tenth me for a lot of weeks.

He was a dumpy-looking man, soft and pale and too heavy, going bald, short of breath, looking out of tired little brown eyes at me, showing no react lion at all to my answers.

"How can we contact her close relatives?"

The Green Ripper

"There aren't any. Parents and only brother are dead. She is divorced from her first husband. No children. I think there may be some distant kin, second cousins and so on, but I would have no idea how to reach them."

"Where has she been lately? Geographically, that is."

"Lately? Up until May she was living in Timber Bay over on the west coast. Then we came around to Lauderdale aboard my houseboat. We took our time. Got here in early August. She dived aboard and then moved to one of the model houses at Bonnie Brae to be closer to her work. A temporary arrangement."

"Did she go out of the country at any time since last May?"

"No."

"Has she been in swamp country?"

"No. Why?"

'Jo you know if any of the people she has been associated with have been taken seriously ill, quite suddenly?"

"I don't know if this is what you mean, but one of the owners of Bonnie Brae fell old his bicycle this morning and "

"I know about that. I mean an illness like hers, characterized by extremely high temperatures, spo- radic delirium, cardiac arrhythmia, and fading blood pressure."

'I can't think of anyone we know who's been sick lately. What's wrong with her?"

"I've ordered every lab test I can think of. I don't approve of the shotgun approach to antibiotics, but I'm giving her a wide range of those. If we can't knock that fever down any other way, I'm going to try packing her in ice." He sighed heavily. "The big problem with treating something when you don't l~now what it is, you can male diagnosis all that more difficult."

"Can I see her?"

He thought it over, then nodded. 'They'll be busy in there. You can see her five minutes out of every hour. I'll approve that It won't be pleasant for you, and I doubt if she'll know you're there."

A nurse came out and motioned to him, and he got up and plodded in, through the double doors. Man at work. A very tired man. But he was an empathetic man because, about ten minutes later, he beckoned to me and took me to her bedside. The rapid shallow breathing had eased. There was an LV. rigged, dripping into the vein in her arm. Her cheeks seemed hollower than they had looked an hour before, in her room, her eyes more sunken.

He said in a low voice, '~e knocked the fever down almost one degree. First sign of progress."

We walked out together and he said, "I'm making a full report of all our findings to Disease Control in Atlanta. Do you know anything about the red welt on the back of her neck?"

The Green Ripper

"She told me she was bitten by a bug this morning. She said it stung her."

"Symptoms bear no relation to anaphylactic shock. We've taken some tissue from the area It's being packed in dry ice and flown to Atlanta along with blood samples and so forth. Got more sophisticated analysis systems available up there. Paper chromatography. Thin-layer chromatology techniques."

The hours blurred. I went in as often as I could. Night and day inside hospitals are too much alike. Saturday night. Sunday. Sunday night. She kept changing, little by little, going further away from me. They did a tracheotomy, and from then on a machine was doing her breathing for her, pumping her chest up and down. When I bent close to her to touch my lips to her dank forehead, I could detect the faint sour smell of mortal illness. At one point, early in the vigil, I went out to the car and made the mistake of trying to eat one of the clammy hamburgers and was siclc on the asphalt.

Meyer came out, bringing a change of clothes and my toilet kit. A nurse found me a towel and took me to a place where I could shower and scrape the pale stubble off my tired brown jaws.

Somebody forgot to stop me and tell me. I went in a little after eleven on Monday night, and she was gone. The bed was empty. The equipment had been moved away.

"Where is she?" I roared, and they came running toward me, hushing me, ushering me toward the door.

A big black nurse, big as a tight end, had been answering questions for me during other visits during that shift. She took hold of my shoulders and gave me a shake. "Easy now! Easy now!" she said in a husky whisper. "It's better we lost her."

"Better than what?"

"Hush now. You hush down. A temperature like that, for so long, it cooked her brain. She would have been a vegetable. Ternble thing, a strong young woman like that." She had led me out into the corridor. "Who you got to come get you?"

"I'll manage." I tried to smile. The tears were mnumg down my face. No sobs. No shudders. Just eyes naming. "Where is she now?"

'They're doing an autopsy."

"Who said they could!"

"It's a law, Mr. McGee. When the cause of death is unknown, they have to. There's no way anybody can stop them, and that's a good law. Whatever is killing people, we have to find it out."

"What finally happened? There was that machine..."

She shrugged. "Total kidney failure, and then the heart gave out right about the same time." She shook her head. Her eyes were shining with unshed tears. "I don't know. We get so many old ones here.

The Green Ripper

Not young strong women like her. Whatever it was, it came and wore her right down to nothing. It took the life right out of her. It ate her up, like it was some hungry thing." She caught herself. "sorry. talk too much. Listen, if you're the only one she had, what you've got to do now, you've got to make the arrangements. She's got to have a burial"

I wallced on out of their hospital, snuffling from time to time, marveling that I could walk with so little thought and effort. Long strides, heels thudding against the tile door, hand lifting without conscious command to flatten against the push plate on the big glass door, push and let me out into the chill night, spangled with stars that were faint above the security lights of the parking area. I walked to the tall dark shape of Miss Agnes, my ancient Rolls, and leaned against one of her high front fenders, my arms folded, ankles crossed, eyes running again.

Cessation.. Ending. A stopping of her. I heard the night sounds of country and city. Yawk of a night bird nearby. Faraway eerie pulsing of siren. Whim poring drone of light traffic on University Drive, lights in moving patterns. Grinding whine of trucks moving fast, a mile or so away. Random night wind clattering palm fronds. This was the world, bustling its way on through its allotted four billion more years of ffme, carrying its four ~billicn souls gracelessly onward. A lot of them had stopped tonight, some in blood and terror. I tried to comprehend the enormity the obscenity of the fact that Gretel Howard had been one of them, just as dead as the teenagers who impacted a tree at a hundred and ten miles an hour near Tulsa, the llying dentist who didn't see the power lines, the Muslim children dead by fire in Bangladesh, the three hundred elderly in Florida who would not make it through the night in their nursing-home beds.

I could not fit my mind around the realization of finality. There seemed to be more that would happen for the two of us, more of life to be consumed and completed. My body knew with a dreadful precision all the contours of her, the shapes and fittings, the sighs and turnings, gasps and pressures.

I sought refuge in a child's dreaming. They had spirited her away, mended her, and would soon spring the great surprise upon me. She would come running, laughing, half crying, saying, "Darling, we were just fooling you a little. That's an. Mid we scare you too much? I'm sorry, Tray, dear. So sorry. Take me home."

And on the way home she would explain to me how she had outwitted the green ripper. I had read once about a little kid who had overheard some adult conversation and afterward, in the night, had terrible nightmares. He kept telling his people he dreamed about the green ripper coming to get him. They finally figured out that he had heard talk

The Green Ripper about the grim reaper. I had told Grets about it, and it had found its way into our personal lan- guage. It was not possible that the green ripper had gotten her.

Not possible.

43

3

Meyer took care of practically everything. I couldn't have managed. I was too listless and too depressed. We both remembered that after her brother's death at Timber Bay, Gretel said she preferred cremation, just as he had. Cremation and maybe a small nondenominational memorial service for close friends. Not many people had attended John Tuckerman's memorial service in Timber Bay. He had been too closely associated with Hum bard Lawless, the man who had taken all the money and tried to run.

I did not think there would be many people who would want to come to Gretel's memorial service. Meyer arranged it at a small chapel up beyond

44

Lee Green Ripper

South Beach Park, at eleven in the morning on Saturday, ten days before Christmas.

Ten or so people came in from Bonnie Brae. And a lot of people from the Bahia Mar area. Meyer calls it a subculture, the permanents. The great waves of tourists and boat people flood the area and recede, leaving the same old faces, most of them, year after year. I did not see all of them come in. When it was over and we walked out into December sunshine, they were there, moving toward me to touch, to shake hands, to kiss, to say some fumbly words: We're sorry. That's what it was about. Together we form a village. And share the trouble as much as we can. Take as much of it upon ourselves as is possible, and we knifer it is not very much. Okay?

There was Skeeter, and there were Gabe and Doris Marchman Gabe's metal crutches glinting in the sun. From charter-boat row there were Billy Maxwell, Lew and Sandy, Barney and Babs, Roxy and his nephews. There was the Alabama Tiger, and Junebug was with him, looking strangely sub- dued. Raul and Nita Tenero were there, up from Miami, with Merrimay Lane. There were Irv Deibert and Johnny Dow, and Choolcie and Arthur Wilkinson, back together again. And there were others, from the hotel and the shops, the boatyards and the tethered fleet.

My village and my people. They seemed to know what I needed most, a sense of place, the feeling of belonging to some kind of resilient society. A man can play the game of being the loner, moving unscathed through an indifferent world, toughened by the diminished expectations of his place and time. I spoke to them, thanked them, managing to keep myself together. As I did so, I thought of the ones who weren't there any more. Lois, of course. Puss Killian. Mike Gibson, of the world before I came to the marina. Nora Gardino. Barni Baker, who went down with her 727 into the swamp short of the airfield. Too damn many of them. I could just barely stand losing them, but I couldn't handle having Gretel gone too. She was destined to be a part of the life that would come after the marina. But she was gone and I was fixed there, embedded in time, embedded in a life I had in some curious way outgrown. I was an artifact, genus boat bum, a pale- eyed, shambling, gangling, knuckly man, without enough unscarred hide left to make a decent lampshade. Watchful appraiser of the sandy-rumped beach ladies. Creaking knight errant, yawning at the thought of the next dragon. They don't make grails the way they used to. She had deserted me here, left me in this now unbreakable mold, this half-farcical image, trapped me in my solitary, fussy, bachelor hang-ups from now until they turned me off too. I shook hands, I hugged and was hugged, and I tried to smile into reddened eyes, and they left, slowly, car doors chunking, driving away from the sunlit ceremony of farewell to my girl.

The Green Ripper

I had parked Miss Agnes two blocks away. An electric-blue Rolls hand-hewn into a pickup truck seemed too conspicuous and frivolous for a memorial service for my dead.

After we got in and I waited for the chance to move out from the curb, Meyer said, '~id it go all right? Did he pick the right things to read?"

"It was fine."

"I tried to ask you ahead of time, but I couldn't seem to get through."

"It was fine."

I thought of the fine running we had done, Gretel and I, on the beach near the shack where her brother was living. I thought of making love with her on the sun deck at dusk, in a hard warm summer rain. I had never really told her how much it all meant. There was going to be plenty of time for that. All the rest of her life. I could make a list of the things we were going to talk about someday. When we had the time.

"Good turnout," Meyer said.

"For God's sake!"

"So I'll keep my mouth shut."

"Fine."

I wanted to apologize, but couldn't find the right way to begin, and so the rest of the ride was silent. He sat beside me like a gloomy bear. I knew his feelings weren't hurt. He was sad because I had lost Gretel, and because we had lost Gretel.

'A picked out an urn," he said, as we pulled into the parking place. 'Nothing ornate. Bronze, though. Seventy-two something, including talc. He wrapped it up in a box and brown paper, ready for mailing."

'A might take it out there."

"I told him you might do that," he said. "I've got the box at my place. 1,11 bring it over. Unless you'd like to have me go on out there with you."

'All let you know, Meyer. Keep it for now. And thanks."

He headed over to the newsstand to see if his copy of Barron's had come in, and I walked back to The Busted Flush, anxious to get out of the suit and get the necktie off. And anxious to see how much Boodles gin I could fit into a king-size old- fashioned glass.

Two men had boarded my houseboat. They were on my little back porch aft the lounge, one sitting on a folding stool, the other leaning against the rail. They were of a size and age, middle height, middle forties, a tailored three-piece gray suit, with white shirt, black shoes, blue necktie with a white figure; a tailored three-plece chocolate-brown suit, with white shirt, brown shoes, tan necktie with a small figure. Gray Suit wore a gray tweed snapbrim hat, and Brown Suit wore a dark brown hound's-tooth tweed hat. Soft jowls, pale faces, horn-rim glasses on one, metal-rim glasses on the other. One stood up and the other pushed off from the rail as I came aboard.

The Green Ripper

"Mr. McGee?" said Gray Suit.

The brain is a swift and subtle computer. I have perhaps become more sensitive the clues which exist in mannerisms, stance, expression, hand gestures, and dress than most people. If you are in a line of work where a bad guess can give you a pair of broken elbows, you tend to become a quick study.

They were not going to try to sell me anything. They did not have the twinkle, the up-front affability. They were not here to enforce one of the idiot rules of a bureaucracy that grows like high-speed cancer. They did not have that look of fatuous satisfacffon and autocratic, patronizing indifference of fellows who come to tell you that you forgot to file Form Z-2324, as amended. Or to tell you that you can't cut down your pine tree without enlisting the services of an approved, accredited, licensed tree surgeon.

They looked important. As if they had come to buy the marina and put up a research institute.. Lawyers? Executives? They were not very fit. They moved heavily. They looked out of place aboard my houseboat, as if it was a little closer to the out- door life than they cared to be.

"I am not exactly cheered up by people coming aboard without being asked," I said.

"Forgive the intrusion, please," Gray Suit said. He had been Me one sitting. 'I am not familiar with marine protocol, Mr. McGee. We were told this is your houseboat, and we have been waiting for you. My name is Toomey. This is Mr. Kline."

'I am not in the mood for visitors or transactions or conversation about anything."

'~e are anxious to talc to you," Kline said. He had picked up a dispatch case I had not noticed be- fore. It matched his suit color. Y think * would all go more smoothly if you did not put us in the posi- tion where we would have to insist."

I studied him. "You are telling me that if you have to insist, you have the leverage to make it stick?"

"We do indeed," said Toomey. "And we would rather not."

So I unlocked and we went into the lounge. I have played respectable poker over the years. I won my houseboat on a broken Bush, four pink ones up and a stranger down. I can sense when a bluff is a bluff is a bluff. They had the leverage, and the clothes and manner to go with it.

Before I invited them to sit down while I changed, I asked to see credentials. They looked vaguely like passports, small with the dark blue cover and great seal of the U. S. of A. Inside were &e color ID pictures, the thumbprint, and the name of an agency I had never heard of before.

"We do not usually go out into the field," Toomey said. "We have access to another agency for investigative matters. But after a conference

The Green Ripper vith our superior, it was suggested that we take a firsthand look."

"At what?"

"Excuse me. I thought you'd guessed."

"Guessed what?"

"We want to ask you what you know about Gretel Tuckerman Howard."

"I just came back from her memorial service."

"We know that," Kline said.

"Sit down. 111 be back in a minute."

I took my time changing into old flannel slacks, Mexican sandals, and an old wool shirt. There was a small chill spot at the nape of my neck. A warniDg of some kind.

They had moved a couple of chairs close to the coffee table. Kline had a little Sony TC-150 opened up, and he was breaking the seal on a new cassette. "I hope you won't mind that I tape this."

"Go right ahead."

He put the tape in, put it on Record and counted to ten, rewound, played it back, rewound again, and said, "December fifteenth, one ten P.M., initial interview by Toomey and Kline with Travis McGee aboard his houseboat moored at Slip F-Eighteen, Bahia Mar Marina, Fort Lauderdale, Florida"

Toomey took over. "Please describe your relationship to the decedent. Wait. Excuse me. Where and when did you meet her?"

"Earlier this year. May. At a beach shack where her brother was living. John Tuckerman. South of

Timber Bay, over on the west coast of Florida. The northwest coast. Her brother died a little while later. I went with Gretel when she flew out to California to have his ashes buried in a little cemetery in Petaluma We flew back to Timber Bay and, sometime in June, we left Timber Bay in this houseboat and came down around the peninsula and back up here to Lauderdale. We made it a leisurely trip. We got here in August. She lived aboard until she located the job at Bonnie Brae in early November and moved out there, to one of the model houses."

With great delicacy Toomey asked, "Would you say that you and she had a... a significant relationship?"

'I didn't care what rules we went by, as long as we both agreed that it would be a permanent thing. Why do you have to know stuff like this?"

"We want to know whether the relationship was such that she would confide in you."

"Confide what?"

'met us just say details of her workday, her life out there. That sort of thing."

"Are you looking into something fishy at Bonnie Brae?"

"Did Mrs. Howard say something fishy is going on at Bonnie Brae?"

'No. No, she didn't. I mean, she called up last Saturday morning before she got sick, to tell me about one of the owners, Mr. Ladwigg, dying in an

The Green Ripper accidental fall his bicycle, if that's what you mean."

Kline took over. "Let me set up a hypothesis, Mr. McGee, and see if that helps. Suppose Mrs. Howard, in the course of her employment out there, learned that something curious was going on. Say that part of the operation was a cover for something else, like gambling or smuggling or something of that nature. Would she have confided in you?"

'`Of course."

'~Would she have confided something like that to anyone other than you? Or as well as you?"

'I can't see that happening."

"And she talked to you about her work?"

"Certainly. About her exercise classes of raffles, and the tennis lessons she was giving to children, and the forms she had to complete on each sale of land, houses, and so forth. She liked her work."

The two men looked at each other, and Kline reached over and punched the key to turn off the recorder. Toomey said, "We do appreciate your cooperation, Mr. McGee."

'wouldn't you say you owe me some kind of explanation... why you are interested in Gretel Howard?"

Toomey smiled sadly. 'I wish we could. I really wish we could. There was a possibility she could have acquired some information which would have been useful to us. Unfortunately she became ill before we had a chance to speak with her."

"If I happen to remember something later on, how do I get in touch with you?" I asked. 'Tm pretty upset right now and I'm not thinking too clearly."

Kline tore a sheet out of a small spiral notebook and wrote a number on it: (202) 661-7007. I thanked him. They put the recorder away in the dispatch case, smiled politely, put on their hats, and marched off, down my little gangplank and off toward the parking area, in step, arms swinging in unison.

Three minutes later Sue Sampson arrived, bearing a casserole of hot beef stew. She apologized for having to miss the service and tools off just as Meyer arrived.

I made the delayed drinks. Meyer put the stew over low heat while we sat and he listened to the saga of Toomey and Kline.

"All right," he said, "so you sidestepped. You left out Brother Titus and the blue airplane and the twenty-acre sale to a syndicate in Brussels. But you make them sound very authentic."

"While they were boring in, I was deciding several things. First, that I am not in very good emotional shape to spar with anybody about anything. Second, that I could get in touch with them later. Third, that they were almost too perfect Too cold and clean. They had no regional accent that I could detect. They said they did not usually go out into the field. That implied some importance to

The Green Ripper talking to me. But it never came off as important. They wanted some hearsay about what might be going on at Bonnie Brae. Colloquial American pronunciation, but a stilted kind of sentence structure. Almost like you when you are at your most professorial."

"Didactic is a better word. The tendency to lee" lure."

"Kline made those little continental crossbars on the sevens in the phone number. See?"

"But that came after you had decided to hold off."

"Before that, their pants were too long. Long enough almost to step on the back of the cuffs. Like Kissinger. The necktie knots were wrong. Frenchmen tie them that way. When Kline cleaned his glasses and held them up to the light, I looked through them too, and I saw no distortion."

"So the glasses were a very minor correction. So both of them have lived and worked abroad. So they spoke another language before they learned English."

'I know. I know. But, dammit, it seemed like such an invasion of my personal privacy to have strangers here asking me to talk about Gretel. I am not ready to talk about Gretel to anybody. I am not impressed by official credentials. Nor by Mr. Robert A. Toomey or Mr. Richard E. Kline, on the staff of the Select Committee on Special Resources in the Senate Office Building."

"Are you sure you remember that accurately?"

'Y'm sure."

Meyer wrote it down on Kline's piece of paper. "No great problem to check it out on Monday, if you'd like."

"Ed like."

Ready for stew?'9

"Right after the next drink. If it all checks out, 111 forget my paranoia and phone them and tell ally'

"And what if it doesn't checlc out? What if your instincts were accurate?"

'.Then Em going to have to try to figure out what they were really after. The cover story was very elaborate. I wouldn't think they'd have gone to all that trouble just for me. I would be incidental to something more important to them, or to someone.9'

I had one drink more than I needed. Meyer dished out the stew. I managed almost half of what he served me. He wanted to clean up, but I shooed him out, sent him home.

After I washed the dishes, I locked up and went over the pedestrian bridge to the beach. A high gray overcast had moved in, pushed by a cool fitful breeze off the sea. I had put on good shoes for walking, and I headed north on packed damp sand, lunging along, carrying with me my sorrow, my mild headache, my sour stomach, and the dull pain in my right thigh which cold and damp will cawe. I plodded along the beach all the way up to Gait

The Green Ripper

Ocean Mile, and from there on I alternated between the beach and A-1-A, depending on obstacles. The cold and the oncoming dusk had emptied the beaches. The glassy facades of the condominiums glittered down at me.

I pushed hard, but even so it had been dark a long time when I crossed back over to the mainland on the Atlantic Boulevard bridge at Pompano Beach. I walked the seven short blocks to North Federal Highway. They were promoting Christmas carols at the big shopping center, pumping them out into the night wind. Jangle bells. And the silent stars go by.

When I found a saloon, I had a small draft beer and phoned a cab. One Oscar Lopez amved in a ratBe-bang rig that smelled strongly of cigar and faintly of vomit. He was dubious about The length of The trip compared width the appearance of the passenger, and I had to show him that I had money. Though he played loud rock and drove badly, he did not have to be told to turn east at Sunrise. He let me off at the marina. I walled to my houseboat, let myself in. It was empty. I had gotten used to a certain amount of emptiness after she had moved way out There to Bonnie Brae. But it had been a conditional emptiness. She could and would return. But now it was a hollowness beyond belief. Even the promise of life and warmal had been drained out of chat clumsy old hull. She was hollow, brittle, tacky, and old, sighing in a night wind, smelling faintly of onion, unwilling to admit that Gretel had ever lived here with me. My legs were leaden with fatigue. The small beer was caught in the back of my throat. Gretel was turned to ash and confined in bronze. The green ripper sailed by on the night wind, looking for more customers. I suggested, politely, that I would give him no big argument this time. But there were others with a higher priority tonight.

I got through Sunday with a little help from my friends. It was a day of cold December rain. I uncrated and hooked up my new speakers. They had been delivered ten days ago. Once they were positioned and adjusted, I tied them down. I had been going to give the old ones to Gretel to give to a friend, but I couldn't remember the friend's name.

The new ones had a great big full rich sound for such small enclosures. They worked all day long. Big music and Bloody Marys. People came by and brought bottles and food and stayed for a time and left again. When it would begin to get too noisy, somebody would remember that too much merriment was probably in bad taste, and things would quiet down, but not for long. It was a party related to a wake.

At the bitter end of the day there was but one guest left aboard. I had heard about her but had never met her. She was the third or fourth wife of some old party from Long Island whose hundredand-twenty-foot ocean-going yacht was moored at one of the big berths, with a permanent crew of five. The Madrina, meaning "godmother," a nice enough name for a ship. The Madrina had been at the marina for a month because her owner had a very bad stroke the day before they were to sail for Bermuda. I did not know who brought the wife aboard my vessel, or left her there with me. Smallish, dark-haired, and very nice to look upon, she was a creature of many subtle perfections. Named Anna. An accent I could not place. Some Portuguese, she said, and Chinese, and a lot of White Russian, born in Hong Kong, and with a degree in engineering from the University of Alabama.

Anna wore a woolly white jump suit with a turtleneck, a heavy-duty gold zipper all the way down the front of it, and some little marine flag signals embroidered over the pocket At five of midnight, after the others had left, there we were. She was curled into a corner of my yellow sofa, brandy glass in hand, looking over at me out of dark eyes under dark brows under the wing of smooth jet hair across her forehead. She stared with a total focus of her attention, watchful as a cat. The white outfit

The Green Ripper fitted so closely no one with figure flaws could have managed it. I couldn't remember who had brought her into the group.

"We have very much the same kind of trouble, Travis," she said.

"We do?"

"They told me the day before yesterday, at the hospital, that Harvey won't live."

'Em sorry to hear it."

"Just two short years. That's all we had."

"Yes. That's too bad."

"Any day now."

'Those things happen."

"I need advice about the Madnna."

'~What kind of advice?"

'@They told me you know all about boats."

'] don't know anything about ships. Over a hundred feet is a ship, unless it is a submarine, and then it's still a boat."

"Advice about selling it. If I should sell it here or have them take it back home. I don't trust Michael."

"Who is Michael?"

YIe is the captain. Maybe if it is best to take it home to sell it, you could help me."

"A boat is a hole in the water into which you throw money. A ship is a bigger hole into which you throw more money. If you don't want it, move off it right now. Get rid of the crew and all perish ables, cancel the telephone hookup, and turn it over to one of the brokers. There are good ones here."

"I really can't do that until after all that will and executor thing is taken care of."

"And he isn't even dead yet."

"The way you say that, you make me sound... terrible."

'Dot intended."

"I didn't think it would be unreasonable, Travis, to suggest that we might help each other. And comfort each other." She added a slight arching of the back, for emphasis. A very subtle movement of her left hand indicated that I should come over and sit by her.

I stood up and said, "I'm dead, Anna. I'll walk you back around to the Madnna."

She tossed off the rest of the brandy, frowned, shrugged, and let me walk her home. She hung onto my forearm with both hands and contrived to bump a hip into me every now and again.

'what if I want to fire Michael and he won't let himself be fired by me?"

I was supposed to volunteer assistance. 'Then you'll have to let the executor ilre him, I guess."

'~e's worked for Harvey for twenty-three years."

We stopped at the gangplank. She said, "Would you like to come aboard and look around?"

'Dot really."

"You're not very gracious, are you?"

"Not very."

The Green Ripper

'Novell... if you feel terribly lonely and want someone to talk to who... faces the same }rind of sorrow, I'll be nearby. Okay?"

"Okay, Anna. Sure. Uptight."

I walked slowly home to The Busted Ftush. There was a sour smell in the night air, like a broken drain. Anna was a very tidy little biscuit, with her old dark eyes set in that child's face. She exuded a tantalizing Savor of corruption, of secret, unspeakable experience. There had been times in my life when I would have been happy to help her pass the time until old Harv died and then talked her into letting me help her take the Madana home, by way of a lot of nice islands.

But I had seen the crocodile tears bulging in her dark eyes when she had said, "Any day now." And I had seen the greed behind the tears, the impulse to break into laughter. Everything old Harv had is now mine, fella. All, all mine. During those past two years she had probably been dreadfully afraid that he would live forever.

When you see the ugliness behind the tears of another person, it malces you take a closer look at your own.

We are all at the mercy of the scriptwriters, directors, and actors in cinema and television. Man is a herd creature, social and imitative. We learn the outward manifestations of inner stress, patterning reaction to what we have learned. And because the visible ways we react are so often borrowed, we wonder about the truth of what is happening underneath. Do I really feel pain, grief, shock, loss?

It is as if we look inside and take a tentative rap at some bell that hangs in there. I had the horrid feeling that maybe my pain was tempered by some sick measure of relief, that I had escaped the trap of a permanent twoness.

Take a rap at that bell, dreading a possible fiat, cracked, dissonant sound of self-pity, of a grubby selfishness.

But it rang true. It rang for her, for my lost girl. The loving and the losing were still larger than life. Than my life. The sound of the bell was almost unbearable. I was like a rat in a cage, subjected to su- personic experimentation. They run back and forth and roll at last onto their backs, chewing their paws bloody. I wanted to swim straight out into the sea. Or go visit Anna and help her into bed. Each was a form of drowning.

64

5 - On Monday morning I awoke glum, got up glum' dressed glum. The sky was a bright pewter, a radiance that cast no shadow but made people squint and walk hunched over, as if searching for something. It would be windless and silent one moment, then a hard blast would come slamming past, picking up dust devils and scraps of paper before sub" siding into stillness. At sea on a day like this I would have been laying a course to the nearest shelter and checking the fuel level to see how fast I dared go to get there. It is the kind of weather Mat makes people cross.

Meyer was cross when he arrived at eleven for reheated coffee.

"How are you?" he asked, peering at me.

"Peachy."

"I'm sorry. It is the standard question one asks. How did you get rid of little Anna?"

'walked her back to her personal ship. What made you jump to the conclusion I got rid of her?"

"Not such a big jump. Why shouldn't you get rid of her? There'd be no reason to keep her around."

"Who brought her and dumped her on me?"

"Lilt MacNair. And it wasn't her fault She just couldn't get the Farmer woman to leave."

"Farmer?"

"Anna Farmer.',

"Don't look so exasperated, Meyer. I never caught her last name. Is she worth talking about, even? And does it matter a damn one way or another what I do or don't do with my days or with my nights?"

"Aha!" he said. "Tragic jigger of a man."

"Meyer, I know what you are trying to do, and I forgive you. But don't keep it up. Understand?"

He stared and finally nodded. "All right. I was out of line. A transparent, clumsy attempt to cheer the troops. What I came over for, aside from dispensing hollow cheer, was to complain about the bureaucracy. And to give you a conundrum to occupy your mind."

"A riddle?"

"Somewhat. I was on the phone at a reasonable morning hour, calling old friends in Washington.

The Green Ripper

There are a lot of offices up there. And strange titles. Deputy Director to the Assistant Director in charge of the Policy Committee on Administration. The phone directory is gigantic. I gave them the in- formation and set them to scurrying about. I gave the same mission to three quite different people in three quite different departments, and then waited for the results. The last call came in fifteen minutes ago. That phone number they gave you is not an operating number. There is not now and never has been, at least in living memory, any Select Commit- tee on Special Resources. The central register of all civil servants has no Robert A. Toomey, but it does have two Richard E. Klines. One is twenty-five and works for the Department of the Interior in Alaska. The other is sixty-one and based in Guam. Interesting?"

My head was too full of fragments, like a kaleidoscope, making its bright patterns of nonsense. I had decided that when they had visited me, my reaction had been paranoid.

'I don't know what to think, Meyer. Don't they have departments sort of hidden away, without public records and so forth?"

"So why give you a bad phone number?"

"Maybe you would like to try to make sense out of it."

"Too many parts missing," he said. He got up and roamed around the lounge, sighing audibly, pausing to look out the port, then resuming his circuit. "High-level inquiry," he said.

"What?"

"Excuse me. I'm talking to myself."

He roamed and muttered and finally sat down. He gave me a bright false smile. "It's all too melodramatic. There is but one way I can make the parts fit together, and it offends me."

"See if it offends me."

"It will more than offend, Travis. All right. Postulate X. X is an unknown force, group, movement, with unknown objectives. X is powerful and has high-priority objectives. Secrecy is imperative. Brother Titus represents the syndicate in Brussels, and he came down here from another part of the country to take a look at the land and make contact with Mr. Ladwigg. The odds against anyone seeing him and recognizing him are astronomical. But that is one way in which life is consistently quirky. It keeps serving up unlikely coincidences. Gretel told us her story about Brother Titus on December seventh. And she said she had seen him last week,' if I remember correctly. Not 'this week,' last week.' The last week in November. Brother Titus went back to X and reported being recognized. For some reason, this created a great danger to the high-priority objective. They had a wee} in which to plan and move. Their representatives were in the area by mid-week, perhaps, or earlier. On Saturday morning Ladwigg fell off his bike and died. Gretel was

68 ' - The Green Ripper taken ill on Saturday. They are the only two, we can assume, who saw Titus face to face. Toomey and Kline came here Saturday to find out if Gretel told you about him. From what you told me of the questioning, they would have gotten the information from anyone less wary than you."

"What the hell are you trying to say?"

"I told you the reconstruction is so melodramatic * offends me. If you had told them all about Brother Titus, as related by GreteL right now you might be in the hospital, fading fast."

I thought it over. I could not make it seem real. "Okay, why the charade? If what is going on is so important, why not just wait until dark, thump my skull, and let me go out on the tide?"

'`They do not want to create curiosity. A man falls off his bike and dies. One of the young women who work for him falls ill and dies. The authorities can accept that as routine. But what if the womants best friend should then die accidentally, or be taken ill in the same way?"

"The authorities would assume the friend caught it from her, whatever it was."

"But that would create a big flap. Gretel's illness and death were reported, you said, to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta."

"By Dr. Tower."

"Having it turn out to be contagious would make headlines."

"Mental games are your specialty, Meyer. But it does not amuse me one goddamn bit to have you making lot of assumptions based on Gretel being murdered, poisoned somehow. For God's sake, you saw her that one time there! She was sick. She was terribly, terribly ill. Know what her last words were? Em burning up. I feel terrible, Trav. Terrible.' Great last words to remember. Comforting. readmit, she could have mentioned Titus to those people out there at Bonnie Brae. She could have asked about him. She could have asked the other partner, or Slater. And she could have told them about the fellow just the way she told us."

"The way she told us, remember, was to start by saying she thought there was something funny going on out there. And she would not be likely to bring that up with the people she was working for. Or with. And one good way to prove I am totally wrong is to find out if Broffski and Hater have been questioned, just as you were. I don't think that pair came here from out of town to talk to you alone."

I looked at him. 'If I thought for one moment that somebody had... poisoned her..."

"I am not sitting here, Travis, trying to dream up a cheap plot line for a grade Z movie. You asked me to try to make sense out of it. I can malce melodramatic sense out of it, if I make the assumption that both Gretel and Ladwigg were killed. If they weren't, the sense of it all eludes me."

'~You're serious['

The Green Ripper

"Enough to want to try to prove it out one way or the other."

"Where would you start?"

"By finding out if Broffski and Slaterwere questioned too."

So once again I drove out to Bonnie Brae. I could not have guessed how difficult it would be. Memories of her were of a painful clarity, a vividness in the back of the mind.

Slater, the manager, was out for lunch Stanley Broffski was in his office. What did we wish to speak to him about? the woman asked. I said it involved some negotiations with Herman Ladwigg. She trotted off and soon reappeared, beckoning us in.

Broffski sat behind a big white desk covered with piles of correspondence and blueprints. He was plump to the point of bursting out of his sport shirt. He had black hair combed across his forehead and a Groucho mustache. He had an air of jolly impatience, amused exasperation.

He waved us into chairs, saying, "Honest to Christ, I wish to hell Herm had the habit of writing things down. Nothing against him, you understand. Nobody ever had a better partner. But he earned around too much in his head alla time! It's driving me up the wall trying to find out who did what to who."

'I suppose," Meyer said, 'Lou divided up all the responsibilities you have here."

'I've got the fat farm and the tennis club, and we'll have a riding stable going pretty soon. They're working on the stalls down there now." He swiveled his chair half around and pointed through the wide window to an old barn a hundred yards away. Two pickup trucks and a van were parked there, near a pile of fresh lumber. Off to the left a clutch of fatties trotted heavily down a long gentle slope. They were mostly women in their middle years, with a few men and a few adolescents, boys and girls. Despite the age differences, the fat at that distance looked the same, bouncing and flapping under the sweaty shorts and shirts. A lean woman was gal- loping along beside them, clapping her hands, running back and forth.

"We work the tract-house part together," he said. I mean, we did. Herm handled the land sales. He was a wizard at that. We're all going to miss him Of course, we both worked with the manager, Morse Slater. Morse keeps evening running smooth If he wasn't around at this time, Pd be whipped. We lost a hell of a good girl right after we lost Herm. Some kind of legionnaire flu, they say. She wasn't here long, but Morse says she was the greatest. Everything from doing the billing to teaching tennis. Hell, it's a sound operation here. Everything will turn out roses. We've got a nice community coming along. We're keeping a lot of

The Green Ripper open space, and nothing tacky gets built. What was it you had going with Herm,gentlemen? Was it something to do with the commercial area?"

"Actually," Meyer said, "we're trying to find out who it was who flew in almost three weeks ago, maybe November twenty-eighth or -ninth, to talk to Mr. Ladwigg, and flew out the next morning."

"In a little blue airplane," Broffski said. His voice was no longer amiable, his face no longer jolly. "I am getting damn sick and tired of that tucking blue airplane. I am going to close that strip. Who needs it?"

He bounded up and went around us to his office door. "Morse! Get in here a minute."

Morse Slater came in, recognized me at once, and came over to me. I stood up, and he shook my hand and said, 'Tm terribly sorry I had to miss the service, Mr. McGee. I thought until the last minute I would make it, but something came up."

I said, "Sure. Understood. Meyer, this is Morse Slater. I told you about him."

As they shook hands Broffski said, "What's going on? What service?"

"Gretel Howard," I told him.

There was a sudden look of comprehension. "McGee! Right. I heard about you from her. What has all this got to do with the tucking blue airplane?"

Meyer said politely, "Has someone else been interested in it?"

'~e had the FAA out here. You tell them what it was about, Morse."

We all sat down and Morse said, "Apparently it was some sort of serious violation of the air safety rules, flying close to a commercial liner, something like that. It was a Mr. Ryan from Washington, a field investigator, and they had traced the plane here. He was a very stubborn mam He couldn't seem to accept the idea that no one except Mr. Ladwigg knew where the airplane came from or who was flying it. He insisted on talking to some of the other employees, and he even had me take him over to the Ladwigg home and let him interrogate Mrs. Ladwigg."

"Catherine didn't know from nothing," Broffski said. "She never saw the guy. She said Herm put him up in the guest wing and talked business in there from the time he arrived until late at night. Herm told her not to bother about dinner, and when she checked the guest wing after the man had left, she found paper bags and cups from one of the fried chicken places down the Drive, so she thinks Herm went out and brought food back. The next morning early she heard Herm drive out in the Toyota. All Herm ever told her was that it was a big deal for a good-sized tract, and they were talk- ing construction and deadlines. Damned imposition for him to go bothering Catherine."

Morse Slater said, "Ryan said to me that he wanted to find out if the aircraft had flown in from

The Green Ripper the islands with a load of coke or grass. He said he wanted to get that pilot out of the air. He just couldn't understand why we didn't have some record of the identification on the plane. I showed him the strip, of course. A grassy strip, an old shed, a wind sock, and a padlocked gas pump. There's nobody there to check anything in or out."

"We let Ryan look through Herm's desk notes and appointment calendar," Stanley Broffski said. "He said he'd come back with a subpoena if we didn't. There wasn't a clue."

'~hen was Ryan here?" Meyer asked.

Slater stared at the ceiling for a moment. "Last Thursday, the thirteenth. He disrupted the day, most of it."

"Remember his whole name?" Meyer asked.

"Ryan, Howard C. In his forties. Pale, broad, soft. Very autocratic. An irritating fellow."

'A still don't understand why you two men are here," Broffski said. "Why should you give a shit who flew in and out in that airplane? What should it have to do with you?"

I reached into the deepest pocket in one of the old bags of tricks and came up with a useful inspiration. I leaned forward, adjusting my face to maximum leaden sincerity, and I secretly apologized to Gretel. "Mr. Broffski, I was able to be with Gretel for a little time every hour, while she was dying. Toward the end there, she came sort of half-awake, and she said, 'Blue airplane. Blue airplane.' I thought she was out of her head from the fever. If she wasn't, then she was trying to tell me something, I don't know what it was, and then when I heard from somebody at the funeral that a blue airplane had landed here the week before she died, I thought... well, it wouldn't be any harm in asking, because you were her friends."

"No harm! No harm at all!" Broffski said. "She was one terrific personality. She had star quality around here. Now I know why you're asking, but I still don't see what it has to do with anything. Herm knew who came in, and it seems as if whoever it was wanted to keep a real low profile."

"I wonder why," Morse Slater said, frowning.

'who knows?" Broffski said. "Maybe some kind of deal he wasn't ready to tell us about. So if somebody is still interested, they'll contact us. If they do, I hope it's better than that Brussels deal of his."

"Brussels?" Meyer asked politely.

"Twenty acres, undeveloped, on the west side of the property," Slater said. "We're holding a ten per cent deposit in an escrow account. The purchaser is something called the Morgen Group. Morgen with an 'e.' "

'fascinating name," Meyer said.

"What's so fascinating about it?" Broffski asked.

'It's an obsolete land-measurement term which used to be used in Holland and in South Africa A morgen is approximately two acres, and the translation, of course, is 'morning.' It derived from ap

The Green Ripper proximately how much land one man could plow with horses in a single morning."

Broffsti stared at him. "You got a lot of stuff like that in your head? What line of work are you in?"

'Em economist. Semiretired."

"The address is a bank in Brussels. I tried to pick it up where Herm left off, and I made four phone calls to that bank. They deny any knowledge of the Morgen Group. All they would say is I should write to that name care of the bank, and if there was a Morgen Group, it would probably be delivered to them. I sent a cable, and the call-back on it said it was undeliverable. I wrote, and we're waiting."

Meyer nodded and said, '`The Morgen Group is probably equivalent in law to what we call a blind trust here. And Brussels is quietly taking the place of Switzerland. Their secrecy is guaranteed by Belgian law. They have number accounts and investment services and they have no reverse interest, as the Swiss do. Thus, with a blind trust, there is a double layer of legal confidentiality. Impenetrable."

'Cathy so secret?" Broffski said. "Harm told me that a bunch of Belgians wanted to build their own hotel-club on the twenty acres, so the members could come here on vacation."

"Maybe it was going to be a front for something," Slater said.

Broffski looked across the desk at Slater, a look of annoyance and derision. "Sure. Right here in our back yard they are going to build a warehouse for the drug business. Or a studio to make porn movies.'9

"Sorry," Slatersaid. But he didn't look sorry.

Broffski sighed. "Well, there isn't anything I can do about it. The land sits there. Eleven months from now we can take the money out of escrow and put the land on the market again. Or develop it. Whatever." He stood up and reached across the desk. "Sorry we can't give you any more help." He shook hands, and we went out with Morse Slater.

"Can we look around the property?" Meyer asked.

"Certainly," he said, and gave us a brochure with a map of Bonnie Brae, showing the existing roads and the ones to come later. He pointed to the area on the map where the Belgians had planned to buy and maybe still would. We thanked him and went out into the silver daylight, squinting against the high hard dazzle of the sky.

78

6

We walked across a field to the airstrip. We walked through a healthy growth of sand spurs and stopped and picked them off socks and pants cuffs when we got to a cleared space. Meyer thumped the surface of the landing strip: with his heel.

"Probably some kind of soil cement," I said. '~You plow it up, mix the cement with the dirt, grade it, water it, roll it down. Quick and easy."

We could hear the unrhythmic whacking of a lot of hammers as workmen were framing a house a hundred yards away.

Meyer said, "If Ladwigg was coming over here to the strip from those houses there, cross-country, he would have to pass that patch of bushes and palmetto over there."

We went over to look for tire tracks. They would be about three weeks old. There was a faint pattern in the heavy grass, a mark of rugged tread in dried mud, and some grease stains on the tallest grass.

"So she stood here, I'd guess," Meyer said.

"Out in the early morning, looking for her pin," I said. "Yes. And so what?"

Meyer shrugged. "I don't know what. Every action we take, every thought we have, they are all based upon some form of information. We know more now than we did before. It is difficult, I think, and erroneous, to try to decide in advance whether additional facts will be useful."

"So if she stood here, and heard the motor and stepped out in this direction, okay, the car would pass close, and the passenger would be three feet away, as she said. And we could backtrack the vehicle to old Herm's house. Incidentally, coming around to the airstrip overland instead of on the road doesn't mean much. The people who own those four-wheel-drive brutes like to take them bouncing through the fields and woods. It does something for their glands. It could be preference instead of secretiveness. On the other hand, he did avoid meeting Mrs. Ladwigg, and the two men ate in the guest wing. Anyway, Meyer, where the hell are we going with all this?"

Roaring at Meyer seldom does any good. He

The Green Ripper gave me the mild smile, the bland nod. 'let's see where we've been. On the thirteenth of December, two days before Toomey and Kline paid a visit to you, a Mr. Ryan visited Bonnie Brae. I do not think the Federal Aviation gets into the business of tracking down small planes which endanger scheduled airline flights. I think that is the Civil Aeronautics Board's chore. And, whoever was looking into it, surely if there was danger of a collision, somebody would have picked up the idenffficaffon numbers of the small airplane. They are required to catty the numbers in very large con- trasting colors. Additionally, the customs people are monitoring all small planes in flight along this coast. And, finally, there seems to be a telltale monotony about the names of the three alleged offlcials Howard C., Robert A., and Richard EL. If any more turn up, we can expect William B. and Thomas D."

Meyer will never cease to astonish me. That heavy skull is loaded with microprocessors. Informaffon is subject to constant analysis, synthesis, storage and retrieval. But when this makes him seem too intellectual, too somber, I have but to recall him at Bailey's, our neighborhood disco, cavorting like a dancing bear with three blond chiclets who adore him, and who listen to him when he sits like a hairy Buddha, declaiming instant legends and inventing instant folk-song lyrics. The dancing Meyer, pelt gleaming under the disco lights, little blue eyes shining, is the antidote to the data-processing machine under the skull bones.

We moved over into the semishade of a young live oak. The shadows had no edges under that white fluorescent sky.

He leaned against the tree. I sat on my heels and poked at the hard dirt with a piece of branch.

"It's too much!" he said irritably.

"How do you mean?"

"Pretend for one moment that Gretel never told us about Brother Titus. She might not have said anything, you know. Then where would we be? You would have accepted their story that they were looking into something that might be going on at Bonnie Brae. Let's hope they accepted your state ment that Gretel had told you nothing. The Ryan person convinced them out at Bonnie Brae that he was what he said he was. Toomey, Kline, and Ryan were mopping up. There is no other answer. Ladwigg and Gretel were both lolled."

'Lao!"

"Yes, Travis. Both deaths were made to look routine. An accident and an illness. They would not make waves. It was somehow terribly important that no one be left alive who could talk about Brother Titus. The secrecy of the whole business indicates that there might be people who might possibly recognize him. It was a remote chance, but one that X could not accept. Remember, I am using X to indicate an individual or an organiza

The Green Ripper lion. of the emphasis on secrecy, I am assuming some link between Brother Titus and the twenty acres on which the Morgen Group made a down payment."

"But there wouldn't be any point in killing Gretel! What if she did recognize him? No matter what is going on, isn't that one hell of an overreaction to being recognized?"

"That's where I draw a blank, Travis. I have been trying to think of something big enough and bad enough and important enough for an organized group and believe me, they are organized to wipe out every possible trace of a vis* from an offlcial of an obscure religious sect. Eradication per se would not be difficult if one had the stomach for extreme measures. Float you out on the tide, and me also, to be totally safe. Eliminate Catherine Ladwigg, Stanley Broffski, Morse Slater, and anybody else Gretel worked with. Eradication of every trace without arousing suspicion is a lot tackier. It requires thought and organization and great care. If Gretel had not talked to you, it would have been successful. If you had been entirely truthful with Toomey and Kline, it would have been successful because they would have dealt with you."

"Melodrama."

Y l~now. I know. But fit the facts together in any other way and you get more nonsense instead of less."

"So the Morgen Group was going to build some kind of top~secret installation at Bonnie Brae. Or a heroin refinery. Or maybe Brother Titus was the fellow behind the grassy knoll in Dallas. Come on, Meyer. How many coincidences can we string to- gether?"

I stood up and headed back across the field to the new asphalt road. I saw something glint in the grass, and bent down and pushed the grass aside and picked it up. I had seen her wear that pin several times when we had gone ashore from The Busted Flush during our long slow trip back around the peninsula It was of Mexican silver, framing a three-dimensional Aztec face carved out of a mottled hard green stone. It was crudely made, and the clasp was not very secure.

How many coincidences can we string together? Sure. If, retracing her jogging route, she had found the pin before Ladwigg drove Titus back to his airplane if she and her ax-husband had not traced her sister-in-law to that California encampment if she had found a different job in Lauderdale...

Looking down at the primitive green face in the palm of my hand, I felt dizzy. The world was all tied together in some mysterious tangle of invisible web, single strands that reached impossible distances, glimpsed but rarely when the light caught them just right.

The biggest if of all. If she had never met me. Because I had brought her here.

If her mother had never met her father.

The Green Ripper

If her aunt had wheels.

An empty path to walk. It leads toward superstition and paranoia, two whistle stops on the road to incurable depression. Once upon a time I took a random walk across a field. I went hither and yon, ambling along, looking at the slay and the trees, nibbling grass, kicking rocks. The first jeep to start across that field blew up. So did the people who went to get the people who'd been in the jeep. And I stood right there, sweaty and safe, trembling inside, while the experts dug over ninety mines out of that field, defused them, stacked them, and took them away. That's the way it goes sometimes. Philosophy 401, with Professor McGee. Life is a minefield. Think that over and write a paper on it, class.

I put the pin in my pocket. Talisman of some nd. Rub the tiny green face with the ball of the thumb. Like a worry stone, to relieve executive tensions. The times I remembered seeing it, she had worn it on the left side, where the slope of the breast began. She had bought *, she said, at a craft shop in San Francisco at Girardelli Square. I hadn't been there with her. All the places I hadn't been with her, I would never be with her. And at those unknown places, at unknown times, there would be less of me present. There can be few things worse than unconsciously saving things up to tell someone you will never see again.

"Coincidence," I told Meyer. "Maybe there was somebody thinning about hustling her on her way, but they didn't have to. She got sick. And antibiotics wouldn't touch it. And she died."

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe it was that way."

My phone aboard the Flush rang at eight fifteen the next morning, and when I answered it I heard the click of someone hanging up. Fifteen minutes later it rang again, and when I answered it, a voice said, 'remember this number, McGee. Seven-ninetwo, oh-seven-oh-one. Go to a pay phone as soon as you can and call this number. Seven-nine-two, ohseven-oh-one."

He hung up. The voice was soft. There was no regional accent. I wrote the number down and finished my coffee while I thought about it. Then I locked up and walked to a pay phone.

The same voice answered. "This is McGee," I said.

"What was your mother's maiden name?"

'l~evlin. Mary Catherine Devlin."

"Drive to Pier Sixty-six and park in the marina lot. Walk to the hotel and go in one of the lowerlevel entrances that face toward the marina, the one nearest the water. Turn right and walk slowly down the corridor toward the main part of the hotel."

"Why?"

After a pause he said, "Because you want to know why somebody died."

'who the hell are you?"

The Green Ripper

"Can you remember what I told you to do?"

"Of course."

He hung up. I went to Meyer's stubby little cabin cruiser, the John Maynard Keynes, and roused him. He came out, blinking into the sunlight, carrying his coffee onto the fantail, looking grainy and whiskery. I repeated the two conversations as accurately as I could.

Mother's maiden name. Standard security procedure. Not generally available."

'A know that. Somebody wants to tell me why Gretel died."

"You're going, of course."

"That's why I came over to tell you. So you'll be able to give somebody a lead if I don't show up back here. If somebody wants to take me out, forget the hotel. It will be the marina parking lot. Drop me there at long range, and untie the lines and take off."

'Y'll come along."

"If you wouldn't mind. He didn't say to come alone. You could wait in the truck. Armed."

'Tut not very dangerous."

'~What we will have are those stupid walkie-talkies, the little ones you bought as a gag. With fresh batteries. The mysterious strangers are probably in one of those rooms. I am assuming more than one. I can keep my unit in my pocket. Without my aerial up you should be able to read a signal from me based on Off-On. We can test them here."

With fresh batteries we found out that he would receive a definite alteration in the buying sound when my unit was turned on, even at a hundred yards. I could give him numbers. Short bursts for numbers from 1 to 9. A steady blast for a zero. Room 302 would be dit-dit-dit duaaa~ nitwit.

"In a building with a steel frame?" he asked.

"Listen harder. They'll take it away from me pretty quick, I imagine. I'll give you the room num- ber soon as I can."

There are a lot of trees in that parking lot, and it has a considerable depth. I circled around the back of it, walking swiftly through the open areas. Then I circled back to an arched entrance, went in; turned right, walked slowly. The rooms were on my nght. So they could have watched me through a window.

I kept my hand in my pocket, finger on the switch. A door opened behind me and I spun around. Room 121. Very easy. A sallow young man, tall, with a lot of nose and a lot of neck, mo- tioned to me to come in. He wore pale-blue trunks, and he had a bath towel around his neck. His hair was still wet from his morning swim.

The familiar voice was right behind me, and I had neither heard him nor sensed him. "Hand out of the pocket. That's nice. Move right on in. Fine. You're doing fine."

With the voice still behind me and the room door

The Green Ripper closed, the swimmer patted me down and took the little gadget out of my pocket. He read the label on it aloud. "Junior Space Cadet." He grinned and tossed it onto one of the double beds. "Clean," he said.

"Sit right down aver there, in the straight chair by that countertop, Mr. McGee," the voice said. Large room. I\vo double beds. Pile carpeting. Small refrigerator. Recently redecorated. Between the half-open draperies I could see beach chairs and a table on the tiny ground-level terrace outside sliding doors, and I could look out toward the marina parking lot.

When I sat down I got my first look at the voice. Like Swimmer, he seemed to be in his late twenties. Mid-height, with the shoulder meat of one who works out with weights. Glossy dark hair, square jaw, neck as broad as the jaw. Metal-rimmed glasses with a slight amber tint. A pleasant smile.

"My name is McGee," I said.

'I think well try to get along without names."

He took the toy off the bed, inspected it, pulled the sectional aerial to full length, and went over and opened the sliding door. "Dr. Meyer? Every~ing is in order here. Why don't you come on in?"

When there was no answer, he tossed the unit to me. I pushed the little piano key and said, 'Jo rea- son why you shouldn't, Meyer."

"Okay." The voice was tinny and remote. "ShaU I bring your hat?"

"No. Leave it in the car and lock up. Room One-two-one."

When Meyer arrived, Swimmer frisked him, declared him clean, and then winked at me and said, 'I was looking for your hat."

"Was it all that obvious?" I asked.

'~Don't worry about it," Weightlifter said. Yt's good procedure. Simple and useful. Keep it. Because it doesn't work with us doesn't mean it isn't any good. But, Dr. Meyer, I'm CUfiOUS."

"Just Meyer, please."

"Fine. What if he'd asked you to bring his hat?.

"There are several ways he could have asked me to bring it. Each one is an option. If he felt the two of us could handle things, I would have been ready when I came through the door, and so would he."

'~ice. Very nice," Swimmer said.

"You seem to know a hell of a lot," I said.

Weightlifter shrugged and sat on the edge of a bed, and motioned Meyer over to a wing chair by the sliding doors. "Not as much as we tried to find out. I'll give you credit. You have some very solid friends around that marina, McGee. We didn't have much time to work on it. We put a lot of people on it. We pulled your military record. We put some tourists into that Bahia Mar Marina We had somebody at Timber Bay. We sent somebody to Petaluma. We know or at least we feel able to assume that you are not wanted anywhere, that

The Green Ripper your identity is correct, that you are not into the coke or grass trade, and that you are not political."

"Who is we?" Meyer asked.

'Eve won't go into that. Just as I told Mr. McGee, we won't go into names either. And we won't show identification. And if you check the register later, it won't do you a bit of good. And, 111 be frank with you, the names and the connections wouldn't mean much to you. We are going to ask questions. Lots of them. This might take a long time. But we start with evidence of good faith."

Swimmer went to the closet and came bac} with a nine-by-twelve manila envelope and handed it to Weightlifter.

"Before I show you these," Weightlifter said, Y must explain how we happened to luck out. Dr. Tower reported the symptoms to the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta They have had standing orders for over a year to report any case which has those same symptoms to a certain branch of the Federal Government. An expert in forensic medicine flew down to Atlanta from New York, starting about an hour after word came to Washington. When it became obvious to Dr. Tower that Mrs. Howard was going to die, he phoned Atlanta. The expert came down here in time to participate in the autopsy. He found what we had instructed him to look for. Take a look at these prints."

I had been watching him covertly. He was lefthadded. He wore a sport shirt that hung outside his trousers, and once when he moved I had identified the bulge on his right side, halfway between the belly button and the point of the hip bone.

He handed me the print, and when he turned to take the other one over to Meyer, I let mine slip to the floor, moved quickly behind him, locked his left arm, and reached around and under with the right hand and yanked the belly holster out, gun, belt clip, and all, and then slammed him into Swimmer, who was heading for the closet. They went into a lamp table and snapped a couple of slender legs as they brought it down.

By then I had the short-barreled revolver properly in hand, and Meyer was standing beside me.

"Slow and easy," I said, and they did indeed move slowly as they separated themselves from each other and from the pieces of lamp and table. There was nothing pleasant about their faces, but nothing ugly either. No sign of strain or worry. A watchful competence, like a very good boxer waiting for the opening.

I have to go on instinct. Sometimes it has betrayed me. Never fatally, fortunately. Most of the time it works for me.

I said, "Well play it your way, gentlemen. I didn't want you to go away with the impression we're a pair of clowns. It is a matter of pride with me. Let's say our relationship has reached a new level. First names would help."

The Green Ripper

I tossed the gun onto the nearest bed and extended my hand to Weightlifter. As he tools it and I pulled him to his feet, he said, "Max. He's Jake."

Jake got up and cocked his head as he stared at me. "Maybe if I hadn't read off the name of that walkie-talkie?"

"Maybe. I don't know."

Max slid the revolver into the holster after checking it over, and clipped the holster to his pants and smoothed the sport shirt down over the bulge. He looked thoughtful. 'McGee, you may be half again as big as I expected, and you are certainly twice as quick as anybody your size I've ever seen, but it was still a hell of a risk. It was a stupid risk. You miss the gun and maybe I kill you as I am falling. From instinct. From training. From too long doing what I do."

"He wanted to mate an impression on you," Meyer said.

Jake said, "There are some folks we work with and work for who would never let us forget how we got taken."

"And never understand it," Max said.

'Tut they weren't here to watch," I said.

I saw the tension going out of him, little by lithe. Jake had a bad bruise on his shin. It was swelling and turning blue. I had torn a fingernail snatching the revolver.

Finally Max grinned at me and said, 'mow I understand a little bit more about some of the things I found out about you. Now they make more sense. But it was still stupid."

Meyer made an odd sound. He looked up from the print he was holding. He looked questioningly at Max and said, "Markov?"

'~Yes. And you better tell me how you know about that!"

94 t

- - l

Meyer looked at Max, his expression puzzled. "But why wouldn't I know about it? It had a lot of pubs licity."

"But how would you make the connection from these photographs?"

Still puzzled, Meyer said, "The details made an impression on me." He looked toward the ceiling, frowned, closed his eyes, and said, "A sphere of platinum and iridium I forget the percentages of each in the alloy. One fifteenth of an inch in diameter, with two tiny holes dolled into it at right angles to each other, with traces of an unknown substance in the holes."

"But you glanced at these photos and made the connection."

Meyer straightened and glared at him. "If you are pretending to be professional, act like a profes- sional. If I had any trace of guilty knowledge, would I have revealed it? The people who do have guilty knowledge are certainly too professional to reveal it."

I interrupted, saying, "Let me explain something. Meyer has a fantastic memory. I don't know what the hell either of you are talking about. What Eve got here is a picture of what looks like a lumpy silver bowling ball with the holes drilled badly."

"The scale, Travis," Meyer said. "Look at the scale."

Yes, it was very small. Maybe not quite as small as the head of a pin, but almost.

'.That item," said Max, "is a twin to the one removed from the right thigh of a Bulgarian defector in London named Georgi Markov after he died with the symptoms of high fever, sharp drop in blood pressure, and renal failure. That was quite some time ago."

"Somebody jabbed him with an umbrella," Meyer said.

"Yes. That one. This is a photograph of an identical object removed from the right side of the baclc of the neck of Mrs. Howard. The traces of the poison found inside those holes are being analyzed. They did not get a complete analysis of the poison

The Green Ripper in the Markov case, or in the Kostov attempt which happened a month before Markov was killed. The pellet hit Kostov in the back in a Paris subway. We can assume a better delivery system was devised to take care of Markov. Kostov recovered."

I sat heavily and stared at the picture of the dull silver ball. Somebody had stuck that thing into the back of the neck of my woman and lulled her. I had been trying not to accept the fact that such a thing could happen, and had happened.

"I'm burning up. I feel terrible, Trav. Terrible."

Her face had become gaunt so quickly. Fever had eaten her up, eaten the quickness and happiness, eaten the brightness.

The reason for doing that to her seemed beyond any comprehension. But somebody did it. And from this moment on, the only satisfying purpose in life would be to find out exactly, precisely, specifically who.

I came back from a long way off and heard the last part of Meyer's question. " many more since the Markov case?"

"Classified information."

"Who does such a thing?" I demanded.

Jake took the answer to that one. '~We could say that we have reason to believe the poison itself, a complex chemical structure, was developed by Kamera, a section of Department V of the KGB. We have reason to believe they have been working for many years on poisons which, after injection, break down into substances normally found in the human body. They killed Vladimir Tkachenko back in 1967 in London when, we think, he tried to defect. Method of delivery unknown. Poison unknown."

"It's like you're speaking a foreign language. This is Fort Lauderdamodale. This is the palm-tree Christmas coming, with Sanny Claus in shorts, and the tourists swarming. What has all this Russian stuff got to do with Gretel and me?"

Max said, 'It has something to do with everyone who lives on the planet, in one way or another."

"Philosophy I don't need," I said.

"Okay. Markov, most probably, was killed by an agent from the Soviet bloc. He was making the big man in Bulgaria, Todor Zhiviov, very unhappy by his broadcasts over Radio Free Europe. We can guess that Zhivkov asked for help to get him silenced. But when it comes to the assassination of a young woman in Florida, we can't make the same kind of reasonable assumption. Put it this way. Russia and the United States are each supportive of various groups and movements all over the world. Arms and ammunition move toward areas of tension. There is no way to exert final control over the use of a weapon. The two major powers try to supply those whose goals are closest to their own, and then they hope for the best. This is a very advanced and exotic assassination device. We can assume the KGB would be cautious about supplying it to any

The Green Ripper one over here. We could have missed it easily. When they took a scrap of tissue for biopsy while Mrs. Howard was still alive, they could have gotten that platinum bead along with it, missed it when they sliced a section for the microscope, and thrown it out without ever knowing. So the intent was to simulate a natural death That leads us to the point. Why could she not be permitted to live? Why did it have to look like a natural death?"

I looked at each of them in turn. "And that's it? You don't know who did it?"

Max shook his head. "We have no idea. We can't find a starting point, except with you two."

Meyer asked, "What kind of people would it be rational for them to supply over here with a thing like that?"

Marc shrugged. "A mole, maybe. Somebody who was put in place a long time ago. Any agitator of any consequence. Weathermen, Symbionese, anybody trying to alter the political equilibrium by violent means. But that doesn't make it sound rational. It doesn't seem like a useful target. One would expect it should be a visiting shah, a premier, or a red-hot research physicist. Let's get to it. Mr. McGee, do you have any reason to believe that Gretel Howard was connected in any way with any political action group?"

I looked down at my fists as I sought the right way to say it. "We had a lot of intense time alone with each other. A couple of months aboard my houseboat. We talked a lot. We opened up to each other an the way. We tracked each other from childhood right on up to the moment. She was as apolitical as I am. We both lived in the world, and didn't get too red-hot about who was running it. Maybe that's wrong in your eyes. But it is the way she was and the way I am."

"And she could not have been conning you?"

"Absolutely no way."

"When and how did she get the alleged insect sting?"

"No idea. She was telling me over the phone every~ing that had gone wrong with her day. No, sorry. She didn't tell me about the insect bite until I saw her in the hospital. She broke a mug I had given her when she was having breakfast, and then she learned her boss had fallen off his bike and died, and then a bug bit her, and then she had fainted and fallen and broken a lamp in the Lad- wigg house. From the sequence I'd say she got bitten, or shot, between eight and ten o'clock that morning. How was it done?"

Jake shook his long sandy head. "The thing is so damn small, delivery systems are difficult. It has so little mass it makes a poor projectile. Like a man trying to hurl a single grain of rice. One of the groups... I mean to say, we've experimented with silver beads which closely approximate the size and weight of one of the deadly ones. The propulsion force can be compressed air, a spring mechanism,

The Green Ripper or a small charge of propellant. Compressed air seems to provide the most convenient, quiet, and compact unit. But for it to penetrate the skin, the maximum effective range is about ten inches. Beyond that, the lack of mass reduces velocity and penetrating power drastically. So someone had to put the weapon within a few inches of her neck. It could have looked like a book, a camera, a walking stick, a tobacco pipe, a purse- almost any small unremarkable portable object. The best time and place would be out of doors, in a crowd."

"Like a crowd around Ladwigg after he fell?" I said.

"Yes, like that," Max said. "Here's the scenario. Ladwigg's early morning bike ride had been cased. Somebody picked the right spot, out of sight of any of the houses, where they could step out and chug} a rock into the front of his face as he came along at twenty miles an hour on his ten-speed. When the body was discovered, the sirens arriving brought people out of the houses widely scattered around there. And the people from the offices. It's a new community. For the most part, the people are strangers to each other. An unfamiliar person would be assumed to be a new homeowner. When they got Markov, they poked him in the back of the leg with an umbrella tip. Mrs. Howard got it in the back of the neck, so, as I said, the weapon could have looked like any innocuous familiar object. And the crowd watching them load Ladwigg's body provided enough diversion. After we learned what had killed the woman and went back in time and took a closer look at the way Ladwigg died, it became obvious they were part of the same assignment for somebody."

"If you know that," I said, "then you've probably done a lot more homework. Why don't you tell us what you know, so we won't be repeating stuffy"

"It's better this way. It's a check on our own information."

"And on us."

"Why not? Memories aren't flawless. Don't have such a low boiling point. Your honor isn't at stake any more," Max said.

"So ask me something."

Meyer interrupted. "Gentlemen!" he said. "Let's all be friends. I think that what I will do at this point is relate the details of a visit by two men to Mr. McGee last Saturday, a visit by one man to Bonnie Brae on Thursday, the thirteenth, some phone calls I made yesterday morning, and a visit to Bonnie Brae which we made yesterday afternoon. But before I get into that narrative, I will first tell you what Gretel Howard told the two of us on the evening of Friday, December seventh. Knowing your area of interest and suspecting the extent of your training, I shall tell this in what may seem like infinite detail, adding my suspicions, inferences, and conjectures as I proceed. Will that be useful?"

The Green Ripper

'~Very."

"Before I begin, let me say that I am taking you two on faith. I am assuming your hats are white. Left to my own devices, I would not be so revelatory. But when my friend Travis threw the revolver onto the bed, he was exercising his right to have a hunch, and because I have seen how his hunches usually work, I am following it."

I moved over to a more comfortable chair. Jake taped the extraordinary performance. Meyer re membered so much more than I did, I wondered if my brain was slowly turning to mush. He spoke in sentences, in paragraphs, in chapters. Marc scribbled a note to himself from time to time. Whenever I thought Meyer was going to leave something out, he came around to it in the next few minutes. When he was through he was slightly hoarse, and we took a break and ordered up a late room-service lunch. Jake intercepted the cart at the door, signed, and wheeled it in.

During lunch there were some obligatory comments about the weather, the price of hotel rooms, the Miami Dolphins' season, and how much vitamin C you take to ward off the common cold.

After the cart was wheeled out again by Jake and the door closed, Max got up and paced, frowning, chucking his fist into his palm from time to time.

He went back to the desk and looked at his notes. "Give me her description of this Brother Ti tus again, please. As close to her words as you can make it."

"I can make it exact," Meyer said.

"How the hell can you do that?"

"Give me a couple of minutes," Meyer said. He closed his eyes and began to breathe slowly and deeply. His eyelids fluttered. His mouth sagged partly open. I had seen him do it before. It was a form of autohypnosis, and he was projecting himself back to the evening of the seventh.

He lifted his head and opened his eyes. Jake inserted a fresh cassette and punched the tape on again. Meyer spoke in his own voice and diction. "Big, but not fat. Big-boned. About forty, maybe a little less. Kind of a round face, with all of his features sort of small and centered in the middle of all that face." It made the backs of my hands tingle and the back of my neck crawl It was foretell word choice, phrasing, cadence, pauses. It was Gretel, speaking again through Meyer, telling us whom to look for.

"Wispy blond hair cut quite short. No visible eyebrows or eyelashes. Lots and lots of pits and craters in his cheeks, from terrible acne when he was young. Little mouth, little pale eyes, girlish little nose. He was wearing a khaki jacket over a white turtleneck. He was holding onto the side of the passenger door because of the rough ride. His hands are very big and... well, brutal-looking."

The Green Ripper

He stopped and gave himself a little shake, and all three of them looked questioningly at me.

"Absolutely exact," I said. "Just as I remember it. I mean, better than I remember it." I was too boisterous, too jovial, too loud, the way you get when you want to disavow being moved by something. I caught Meyer's look of concern. I envied him his ability to regress himself to the actual scene, to be with her in that way I had no way to be with her. Memory has a will of its own. When I forced it, she would blur out. It had to come to me in sudden takes, little snippets from the cuttingroom floor of the mind. They came smoking in, stunning me.

The tape was stopped. Jake had put the cassettes in a row, in order. He began numbering them, dating them.

Marc looked at his notes. "When there is a near collision in the air, NASA is the investigating agency. They recommend to the FAA the action to be taken. So do the controllers and airport managers. We'll recheck the three of them Toomey, Kline, and Ryan, but will come up probably with just what you have, Meyer."

Meyer nodded and said, 'I keep thin3dog, Max, wondering what those three do represent. Travis caught that faint continental fisvor. But he says the speech was colloquial American."

"Buffalo, St. Louis, or Santa Barbara," I said, "or anyplace in between. Middle height, middle age, no distinguishing features. Office. Flabby and pale. Both with glasses. Invisible men. Clothes off the rack, not cheap and not expensive. HelL if you walked through any downtown past the banks on a Tuesday noon, you'd see them walking together to lunch. If you lined up ten of them, Pd have a sorry job trying to pick out my two."

'~You're describing the average, upper-echelon, middle-Buropean, or Eastern European agent. They don't see enough daylight. They spend a lot of time on the files. They eat too much starch. And the KGB has the best language schools in the world. Crash courses, and they turn out people who can speak the language of the assigned country like a native. Of course, those guys are motivated. If they don't work hard enough learning the language, they end up in Magnitogorsk or some damn place, processing internal travel permits. They're good Just not very flexible. They're not good at jettisoning one plan in mid-flight and inventing a second one that might work."

"But how could they fit into all this?" Meyer asked.

Max grinned at him. "You want another scenario? The way I read it, somebody goofed badly on something very important. So they sent Igor and Vashily here on a tidy-up mission. Plug the holes. Find out who knows what, report back, and await orders."

The Green Ripper

"Their presence would imply some importance to this."

Jake laughed, and snapped one of the eight-byten glossies with a fingernalL "You bet your ass there's something important going on. The presence of this little sphere proves that. We'll go througli the Church of the Apocrypha to locate this Brother Titus and find out if he is coincidence or part of it somehow. I don't have much hope of unwinding anything in Brussels. We've bounced off that wall before. It's very tight over there."

Max stood up and said, "We're very grateful for your cooperation, gentlemen."

'din you contact us again?" I asked.

'doubtful."

"How would we get in touch with you?"

"Why should you?" There was some amusement in his steady gaze.

I said, "Who knows? Something else happens that fits in with this, who do we ten?"

Jade said to Marc, 'If we don't know what's going on, we don't know if they are involved more than they think they are. An identity mixup. Or something observed they shouldn't have seen."

After a moment of thought, Marc nodded and wrote a number down and tore it out of his pad. "Memorwe this number. Use a phone you can control for a couple of hours. It may take that long for a cat/-back. Here is what you say. That line win always answer, day and night. The person will say hero. You say, 'Was somebody at this number try" ingto reach Travis McGee?' They'll say they don't know, but they can check around and find out. Then you say, 'If anyone was, I can be reached at such and such a number.' then wait. Clear?"

"Perfectly," I said.

Max stood a little taller and said, "You shouldn't have gone out to see Broffski and Slater. The cover story was halfway okay, but frail. What you shouldn't do, either of you or both of you, is push at this thing any more, from any direction. We've satisfied ourselves you can both keep your mouth shut about what you learned here. Finding out the kind of security clearance you had once upon a time, Meyer, helped in that decision. So lay low. Keep down. Bleep quiet. In return for that, I promise I'll find some way to let you know when we've tidied up. No, don't leave just yet. I have to make a call."

He made it from a phone in a dispatch case. He grunted and listened, grunted and listened, then said thanks and hung up and slapped the case shut. No sign of your being followed here. There's no directional bug on your pickup truck, and your home phones on those two boats are not tapped."

"She died a week ago today," I said. "She didn't want to die. She was pushed over the edge. She was pushed off the earth. And you want me to keep down and keep quiet."

Max looked at me with a pitying expression. '`If

The Green Ripper you wanted to thrash around, what could you do? Where could you start? Suppose you knew for sure that the DGI did it."

"What's the DGI?"

"The Cuban secret service. It has been directed and controlled by the KGB for nine years at least. What next? Who do you ask? Who do you go see? And who would know anything anyway? Is whoever killed her still alive? Maybe not Intelligence operations are compartmentalized, There is only one contact between cells, and few people in any cell. I don't care what you do. Just don't go to the police to complain about an unsolved murder, and don't write your congressman about internal se- curity."

"We can leave now?" Meyer asked.

Max nodded. Jake took a look at the corridor. We left. The day was the same kind of day. But the world was a different kind of world.

109

8

We were back aboard The Busted Flush by four o'clock. My brain seemed to be droning along in neutral. I could not kick it into gear.

Meyer selected a beer. I roamed back and forth with a beaker of Boodles on ice. "I don't want it to be depersonalized," I said. "I want it to be a single person with a single motive. I don't want it to be organizational, a committee decision. You can't get your hands around the throat of a committee. You can't beat the face of an organization against a brick wall."

"Listen to me, Travis. Stop pacing and listen. ~ she was killed because she discovered something, by pure accident, she should not have known, then

The Green Ripper it is accidental death. The world is full of secret plans and understandings. A sniper in Lebanon misses and the slug smashes the head of a child a half mile farther away. What can the child's father dot Who does he see? Where does he file his complaint?"

"Somebody aimed at her, Meyer, and didn't miss."

"And your chance of ever finding that somebody is exactly zero."

'Then I'll find who gave the orders."

"Again zero."

"How can you possibly know that?"

"Travis, please sit down. I can't talk to you when you keep walking around behind me. There. That's better. And if you can listen a little, it will be better yet. I live in two worlds, yours and the real world."

"Come onl"

"Just listen. In your world the evil is small scale. It is one on one. It is creature preying on creature. All right, so it can be terrifying. I am not trying to say it is like games in a sandbox under the apple tree. A person can get killed doing what you do, and I think it is a worthwhile way for you to live. In these past few years it has made you a bit morose, but that is only because any kind of repeti- tion leads to a certain staleness of the soul. Too many beds, and too much dying. Greed and love begin to wear the same masks. Gretel gave me high hopes for you. You were emerging from the dolor of repetition. Now you look as if you had been hit on the head with a mallet. In your world, your heart is broken. I want to reach you before you start any kind of move that will break your heart on a larger scale than you can now conceive of. All right?"

'weep talking."

"When I attend conferences on international monetary affairs, when I go give my little speeches, or go earn a little fee for consultation, I hear of many things. They alarm me. I cannot tell you how much they alarm me. In Iran a little band of schoolteachers dribble gasoline around the circumference of a movie house and light it, incinerating four hundred and thirty people, most of them children. In Guyana nine hundred Americans kill themselves, for reasons as yet unexplained. There are over four billion people in the world, and each day more and more of them are dying in bloody and sickening ways. The pot is beginning to simmer. The little bubbles appear around the edged Intrigue, interconnected, is multiplying geometrically, helped along by the computer society. Orbiting eyes in the sky scan us all. Poisons abound. The sick birds fall out of the air. Signs and portents, Travis. And here we are in happyland, in a resort town, with the bright sunshine, bright boats, humid young ladies. This is all stage setting. Carnival. Scenario. The real world is out there in a slow dreadful process of change. There is a final agony

The Green Ripper of millions out there, and one and a quarter million new souls arriving every week. We try to think about it less than we used to. None of it makes any sense, really. But then whatever it is that is out there, it moves into this world in the shape of a tiny sphere of platinum and iridium and deadly poison. Now we have to thinlr about it, but it cannot be personalized. It is all a thing, a great plated toadlizard thing with a rotten breath, squatting back inside the mouth of the cave, infinitely patient."

"So keep on having fun?"

"That's not very responsive."

"Sorry."

"Being an adult means accepting those situations where no action is possible."

"Except joining the Church of the Apocryphal"

"Have you lost your mind?"

"Brother Titus will forgive my sins."

"It's an idiotic idea."

'] have to go out to California anyway, with... the ashes."

'when are we leaving?"

I smiled at him and shook my head. "Not this time, Meyer. Part of this trip is trying to get away from myself somehow. I have no delight in what and who I am. Not any more. Not here."

Meyer sat and looked at me for a long moment, the small bright blue eyes intent, the face impassive. "You take yourself wherever you go, Travis."

"A popular truism."

He finished the beer and put it aside. "I'll go get the urn."

"You don't have to bother right now. I can come and get it when I'm ready to leave."

"I might not be there. I'll get it now."

He was back in ten minutes with a cardboard carton, a vise-grip wrench he had borrowed a year ago, and fifteen dollars he claimed he owed me and insisted I take.

And then he was gone. It had not occurred to me that I would hurt Meyer, but there seemed to be no point in going over and apologizing to him. Through me, he had acquired a taste for the salvage business. Now there was nothing left to save but myself. And he couldn't help me there.

I fixed myself another heavy drink and, carrying it along, I went through all the interior spaces of The Busted Flush. I remembered all the lovely women. I looked at the huge shower stall, the sybaritic tub, the great broad bed in the master stateroom. I looked at the speakers and turntables, the tape decks and tape racks. Everything had a sweet, sad look. Like a playpen with scattered toys after the child has died.

When the drink was gone, I went down to my hidey-hole in the forward hull and removed all my reserve and took it up to the lounge. Ninety-three hundred-dollar bills. Life savings. Wisely invested, it might bring me almost eighty dollars a month. I sat and planned what I would wear and what I

The Green Ripper would carry, and mentally distributed my fortune in inconspicuous places.

Then I looked directly at the cardboard carton for the first time. Firmly taped and tied. Ten inches square, twelve inches tall. All the remains of the physical Gretel.It hefted at about the weight of a sizable cantaloupe.

I sat at the little pull-down writing desk again, and I wrote a letter to Meyer:

I will take this up to the office and give it to Linda and tell her to hold it a few days and then give it to you. By then I will have added the keys to this boat, and to the Munequita and to the car. I will have emptied out the perishables and turned off the compressors and arranged for disconnect on the phone. I am enclosing five hundred in cash I better make that eight hundred to take care of expenses around here. I will have put the phone on temporary disconnect and arranged for my mail to come to you. Today is December 18th. If I am going to be able to make it back here, I will get word to you somehow on or before June 18th. If you don't hear by then, everything here belongs to you. Franlc Payne has a will on file to that effect, witnessed and all. I don't really know what is mak

115

John. MacDonald ing me act the way I am acting.. You would know more about that than I, probably. I have this very strong feeling that I am never coming back here, that this part of my life is ending, or that all of my life is ending. I have been bad company a lot of the time the past few years, going sour somehow. Gretel was the cure for that. I came back to life, but not for long. And this is what the stock market guys call a lower low. I just feel futile and ridiculous. You are the best friend I have ever had. Take care of yourself. Make a point of *. If I don't come back, what you should do is move aboard the Flush, peddle your crock boat and the Munequita and the Rolls, and throw a party they will never never forget around here.

I put it in a heavy brown envelope and left it unsealed. It was dark. I tools a walk around my weather decks. The night smelled like diesel fuel. A nearby drunk was singing "Jingle Bells," never getting past the sleigh, starting again and again and again. The boulevard hummed and rustled with cars, and there was no sound at all from the sea. A woman laughed, a jet went over, and I went back inside. Somebody working his way into his slip

The Green Ripper made a small wake, and the Flush shifted, sighed, and settled back into stillness.

On the following Saturday morning I found the same man at the Petaluma cemetery, the one Gretel and I had dealt with when we had flown out with John Tuckerman's ashes. He was cultivating and reseeding two parallel curving scars in the soft green turf. He was a broad muscular old man with a bald head and thick black eyebrows. He wore sneakers and crisp khakis. He dropped the tool, dusted his hands, and tilted his head to one side as he looked up at me.

'weren't you here way last spring? With the Tuckerman girl?"

"With Gretel Howard. Her married name."

"What you got there?"

'QVell... she died. Gretel died. This is her ashes."

He mopped his face and turned slightly away and looked upward into a tree. He sighed. "Sorry to hear it. Even if it was a sad time for her, bringing her brother's ashes here, it wasn't hard to see you and she were real close, real happy with each other."

"Yes, we were."

"Too bad. Nice size on that girl. Great smile. What did she die from? Automobile? That is what takes most of the young ones."

"Some kind of flu with a high fever and kidney failure."

"I tell people it's the bugs striking back. Those laboratories go after the bugs with powerful new poisons and it stands to reason that the ones that live through it, they get twice and nasty as they ever were before. Of course, John and Gretel's folks, they died premature, but it wasn't sickness. I suppose you want her in the family plot. Dumb-ass question. You wouldn't be here if you didn't."

"Can we go right ahead with it?"

"Don't you remember how it was before? There's got to be the permit, and they've got to have vital statistics for the records, and there's the fee."

"The office is closed."

'A know. They used to stay open Saturday morning, but not lately."

'Eve got a copy of the death certificate here, and I've got her birth certificate, marriage certificate, and final decree of divorce. Here, you can have them."

He tools them and then tried to give them back to me, saying, 'I don't have anything to do with the office part."

"And if the permit hasn't gone up since last time, here's the fifty dollars."

He hesitated and finally took it. '] guess we could do it now and I could give them this stuff Monday. But don't you want any words said? She said the words for her brother."

The Green Ripper

"As I will for her."

The Tuckerman plot was in that part of the cemetery where the stones were flush with the ground which, as he had mentioned when I had seen him before, made mowing a lot easier. While he went to get the post-hole digger from his shed, I opened the carton. The urn was shinier than I had expected it to be, and more ornate. It looked like a large gold goblet with a lid.

She had owned a small worn book of the collected poems of Emily Dickinson. She had read two of them over her brother's grave. She had marked the ones she liked best. There were three short ones I wanted to read.

I could just make out the place where the old man had dug the hole before, for John Tuckerman's urn. He chose a new spot and asked me if it was all right. I approved of it and asked him if I could dig.

'leave the dirt close and neat," he said.

He watched me as I chunlred the tool down, lifting the bite of earth in the blades, setting it aside each time, close and neat. Once it was down over a foot, it began to get me in the small of the back. It is an awkward posture, an awkward way to lift

When it was deep enough, he stopped me. I lifted the urn out of the box and, kneeling, lowered it to the bottom of the hole. I stood up then and read the first two poems, the longer ones. My voice had a harsh and meaningless sound in the stillness, like somebody sawing a board. I said the words I saw on the page without comprehending their meaning. Then I read the one she had read to her dead brother, called "Parting."

"My life closed twice before its close It yet remains to see If Immortality unveil A third event to me

"So huge, so hopeless to conceive As these that twice befell. Parting is all we know of heaven, And an we need of hell."

I bent and dropped the faded blue book down the hole, and then, kneeling, using both hands, I cupped up the dirt and filled the hole and tamped it down, replaced the circle of turf I had cut with the digger, and with the edge of my hand brushed away the loose dirt into the grass roots.

'No marker for her either?" he asked.

"I don't think so. Neither of them had children to come and look for the place." The oblong of marble, level with the earth, reading TUCKERMAN, was enough.

"Those words were line the ones she read that time. Is that some kind of one of these new religions?"

`'Sort of."

The Green Ripper

'I thought so. There's a lot of them these days. I guess having one is better than having none, but it makes you wonder." He looked down toward the office and the road. "Where'd you park?"

"I walked out from the bus station."

"Where are you going? Back to Florida?"

"I haven't decided."

"This town isn't as bad as some. If you need work, maybe I can think of somebody you could go ask. You look sort of down on your luck, mister."

"Thanks. If I come back this way, I'll look you up."

When I looked back from the road he was still watching me. I waved. He waved and turned away, back to his work fixing the scars where somebody had torn up the turf doing funny stunts in an autos mobile. I dug my duffel bag out of the bushes where I had hidden it and shouldered it with the wide strap over my left shoulder, the bag bumping against my right hip. My poncho was strapped to the duffel bag. I wore work shoes, dark-green twill trousers, a faded old khaki shirt, a brown felt hat, a gray cardigan sweater. I had sandy stubble on my jaws and neck. Before leaving Florida, I'd had my hair clipped down to a Marine basic cut, which could have been a prison cut. I carried in my shirt pocket, for the right occasion, a pair of glasses with gold-colored rims, hardly any correction in the lenses, and one bow fixed with black electrician's tape. I wanted to attract a second look from the av erage cop, but without stirring enough curiosity for him to want to check me out. But if he did check me out, I had some credentials. I had an expired Florida driver's license with my picture on it, and I had a fragile tattered copy of army discharge papers, and a social security card sandwiched in plastic. They were wrapped in a plastic pouch and were in the compartment in the end of the duffel bag. They all said I was Thomas J. McGraw, address General Delivery, Osprey, Florida, occupation commercial fisherman.

'~Well, officer, it was like this. My old lady died and I sold off our stuff and the trailer, and I thought I'd come out here and poke around and see if I could locate our daughter Kathy. She took off six years ago when she was fourteen, and we heard from her two years ago, some postcards from San Francisco, and Petaluma and Ukiah. She said she was joining up with some kind of church Me, I come here by Greyhound bus."

As I walked, I wrote my autobiography, and the story of my marriage, and my wife's death. I made Peg and Kathy into real people. I made Tom McGraw into a real person. As I walked, I went over and over the imaginary events of my life until I could see them. I outlined my own personality. I was not too quick of wit, and I tended to lose jobs through getting drunk and not showing up. When I worked, I was a hard worker. I was a man of great pride. I did not suffer unkind remarks about my

The Green Ripper character or my station in life. I was a womanizer when I was in my cups. Peg had been a staunch churchwoman. I went with her a couple times a year. I shared most of my political opinions with Archie Bunker. As I walked, I talked to imaginary people, talked as Tom McGraw would talk to them. He was servile when he talked to people in power. He was affable as a dog with his peers. He was nasty to those he considered beneath him. I worked my way into the role.

Long, long ago, I had known an actress. Susan was twenty-four. I was sixteen. She was working in summer theater. I was working in the country hotel where she was staying. She was a lanky lady who cussed, wore pants, and smoked thin little cigars. I found her monstrously exciting. I was worried about myself that year. There had been an episode with a loud chubby girl who, true to locker-room gossip, was willing to put out. But she was so loud that I was less than able. I could almost but not quite count it as the first time. I could lie to others but not to myself, and I had the dread fear Lolly would tell everybody. I was worried about myself.

Though I was a head taller than the actress, she didn't want to be seen with me around town. I would walk out into the country, and she would come along in her borrowed car and we would go up into the hills and park and go walking together. In August, after we had gotten into the habit of making a bed from a blanket and spruce bows, in hidden places, while we were resting from each other, I told her about Lolly and about my fears. She laughed her deep harsh startling laugh and told me that I had less to worry about than anybody she had ever known. It was very comforting

It was repertory theater, and she had to refresh her memory in a lot of roles. It startled me the way she could turn herself into an entirely different person. We would sit in the shade and I would give her her cues from the playscript, and then we would walk and she would become the character in the play. I had to ask her questions, any questions, and she would respond as that person would have responded. She explained that it was the best way to do it. One had to invent a past that fitted, and memories that fitted. She explained that once you were totally inside a false identity, secure in it, you could handle the unexpected on stage in a way con- sistent with the character.

And I had used that afterward, many times, and now I was using it again. Susan taught me a lot. Once she got me past the initial shyness, she showed me and told me all the ways I could increase her pleasure while delaying mine. It gave me a wonderful feeling of domination and control to be able to turn that strong, tense, mature female person into gasping, grasping, shuddering incoherence. I was in love with her, of course. I could not stand the thought of the summer ending. I told her I

The Green Ripper loved her, and I was going to come to New York to be close to her.

I will always remember the way she cupped both hands on my face and looked deeply into my eyes. "Travis, you are a very very sweet boy, and you are going to become one hell of a man. But if I ever find you outside my apartment door, I am going to have the doorman throw you out on your ass. We can end it right now or next week, whichever you choose. But end it we will, boyo, with no loose ends. No letters, no phone calls, no visits. Ever."

And that's how it was.

So now I walked my way deeper into my Tom McGraw role. Trucks whuffed by, with the trailing turbulence tugging at my clothes. Divided highway. Route 101. Looking for the daughter lost. Too many years ago.

This didn't have the bare rolling look of the hills near the sea below San Francisco. There was more water here, rivers and lakes and forest country. I had flown into San Francisco as Travis McGee, taxied to a Holiday Inn near Fisherman's Wharf, and spent a day assembling a wardrobe to go with the new identity I had bought from a reliable source in Miami. The McGee identity fitted into a suitcase. I stored it and paid six months in advance. The storage receipt was the only link, and I didn't want it on me. Small things can be hidden in public places. There was a bank of new storage lockers in the bus station. They were not quite flush against the rear wall. I taped it at shoulder height to the back of the lockers, out of sight. E I could stand up, I could get it back. If I wanted it back.

I gave up walking when the heel of my right foot began to bother me. The work shoes were too heavy for one who had spent such a chunk of his life barefoot. I wished I had taken the bus.

I found a good place to hitch a ride. I hate to see the damn fools on the highways hitching in the wrong places. It is a waste of energy. You have to be where they can see you a long way off, and where you stand out well against the background. They have to be able to see a lot of highway beyond you, and they have to spot a place where they can pull off. You have to make a gesture at each car, a big sweeping one. You leave the duffel bag at your feet and you take your hat off, and you smile wide enough to show some teeth. An animal will roll onto his back to demonstrate his harmlessness. A man will grin. It is better to trust the animal.

A gaunt old man in a rattle-bang Ford pickup stopped at high noon and picked me up. He wore banker's clothes and a peaked cap that said Oakland Raiders.

"Only going as far as Lake Mendocino, friend," he said.

"Is that past Isaiah?"

"Next door. I can drop you off before I make my turn. Get in." He looked back, waiting for a hole in the traffic, and when one came along, he jumped into it with surprising acceleration.

"Don't know this country, oh?"

"Don't know it at an. This is the ilrst time for me."

Hunting work?"

"Well, I might have to do some to keep going. But mostly I'm trying to get some kind of trace of my little girl. I think she's out here somewhere."

'`There's a lot of young girls out here somewhere. There was a time in the sixties when they'd come drifting up from San Francisco. Communes and farming and all. What they call alternative life" styles. Potheads, mosey. No offense. I'm not saying your girl is one of those. She missing long?"

"Six years."

"Hear anything from her in all that time?"

"One time, and that was four years ago. She'll be

The Green Ripper twenty now. Peg and me, we married young. Kathy was sixteen when we got those cards from her. They came over a month or so. They never gave an address we could write back to. They were mailed in San Francisco, and then the very last one was from Ukiah. It said she was joining up with some kind of church and we should forget about her forever. You know, when you've got just the one kid, you don't forget like that. It took the heart out of Peg. She died a while back, and after I sold off a little piece of land and the trailer and an old skiff, I thought I might as well use the money trying to find her."

"Friend, this state is chock-ful1 of religions. You can find any kind you are looking for. There's some that'll take you to Guyana and teach you to raise oranges and how to kill yourself quick. They start in the north and go all the way down to the Mexican border, and to my way of thinning, the further south they go, the crazier they get. People are hunting around for something to believe in these days. All the stuff people used to believe in has kind of let them down hard. You'd have to know the name of the religion first, I'd say."

"I learned it by heart. The Church of the Apollo rypha."

"I've lived pretty close to Ukiah for ten years, and I can't say I ever heard of it. But I've seen some strange ones drifting around the streets there, selling flowers and candy and wearing white robes."

"I can ask around there, I guess. Big place?"

"No. I'd guess maybe twelve thousand. What kind of work you do?"

"I fish commercial. Net work, mostly. Mullets usually. When they're hard to find, it pays good. When they're easy, it isn't hardly worthwhile going out, you get such small money. What kind of business are you in?"

"Investments."

"Oh." From the way he said it, I knew that was all I was going to learn. He moved the pickup right along, tailgating the people who wouldn't move over into the slow lane.

"Where would be a good place to ask in Ukiah?"

"Maybe the police. Police usually }now about the crazies and where they live."

He dropped me off at the Uldah ramp. The wind felt cool and fresh. I found one gas station that wouldn't let me use the rest room, and another one that would. I shaved off the stubble and put on my wire glasses and looked into the mirror. In the hard fluorescence, my deepwater tan looked yellowish Deep grooves bracketed my mouth. The gold glasses did not give me a professorial look. I looked like a desert rat with bad eyes.

He was an officer of the law. Not too long ago he had been a fat, florid, hearty man. The balloon was deflating. He had made a couple of new holes in his belt. His color was bad. His chops sagged. He

The Green Ripper looked me over with a listless competence. And he listened to my story. "Apocrypha. Kind of rings a bell. Short dirty-white robes. Beards. Sister this and Brother that." He dialed a three-digit number and leaned back in his leather chair and began murmuring into the phone, listening for a time while he stared at the ceiling. Then he hung up and took a sheet of yellow paper and drew a crude map.

"Where that outfit was, McGraw, they were over in Lake County. They had a pretty good-sized tract. What you do, you take Twenty East and go over past Upper Lake, maybe two miles, and there's a little road heads off to the east, unpaved but a good surface. You go along that road, mostly uphill, and it winds around and there are little roads heading off it, smaller still, and that encampment is off at the end of one of those. You'll have to ask around."

"Thanks. I appreciate you taking the trouble."

"Afraid it won't help much. Seems they've pulled up and moved off someplace. Might be nobody left there at all."

"It's the only clue I've got."

For the moment he forgot his own woes. "Listen, McGraw. There's thousands of kids took off. A lot of them don't ever show again. It's a sign of the times. What I mean is, don't expect too much. It's a good thing to look around, to satisfy yourself you did all you could. But don't expect too much Okay?"

"Thanks. I won't. I mean, I'll try not to."

By Sunday noon I had found it. I had spent the night in a small rental trailer under giant ever- greens. I had hitched three rides, walked through two monstrous rainstorms, and climbed what seemed to be several mountains.

So now I stood where Gretel and her husband had stood. The signs were large and explicit. Red lettering on white. PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. The wire gate she had described blocked the road. Beyond the gate the road curved up and to the right, out of sight behind the trees and brush. There was a lean-to on the right, just beyond the gate. The last people I had asked, the ones who had given me the final directions, had said that they thought there were a few left up at the encampment, but that most of them had gone away. They said that sometimes they saw a van on the road. Black, with a gold cross painted on the sides.

I am Tom McGraw, looking for the traces of a daughter lost. I have a father's bullheaded determination. So I forge ahead. Climb the fence close to the gate, drop the duffel bag, and drop down beside it. Shoulder it and walk up the muddy road.

There was a cathedral of evergreens on either side of the road, standing at parade rest on the slope, the ground silent with needles. The sun was suddenly covered again, and I heard a high soft sigh of rainwind in the pine branches. I trudged up

The Green Ripper the curve and up a steeper pitch. The stand of trees dwindled, and there were boulders among them big as bungalows. I came out at the top. Far away to the northeast I could see sunlit mountains. I was on an old rocky plateau, quite level, as big as four football fields. It sloped gently down toward valleys and gullies on every side. Off to my right, at the end of the big plateau, was a clutter of small structures. The biggest was a corrugated steel and aluminum building that looked like a pre-fab warehouse. There were several small cement-block buildings, and several trailers on block foundations. I saw one derelict truck.

There was no sign of life. I wanted to see if the road continued on the other side of the field. I hollered and waited and heard no answer. I walked across and looked. There was no road down the slope. There had been a stand of small trees there, with the biggest about three inches in diameter. They were broken off about two feet above ground level. At first I thought somebody had driven up and down there with a vehicle. Something nagged at memory. I walked down the slope. The damage was not fresh. The wood was splintered and dry. I squatted and found where slugs had creased the bark. Very heavy sustained fire from an automatic weapon would chew them off just like that. Using the bark creases for rough triangulation, I was able to go back up the slope to the approximate area where the weapon had been. I poked around and fi

133

John D. I`lacDor~ald nallysaw a glint of metal in a crack of the rock. I levered it out with a twig. It was a white metal shell casing, center-fire, in a smaller caliber than I would have expected. But it looked as if there was room for a hefty load of propellant. There was an unfamiliar symbol on the end of it, like a figure 4 open at the top, and with an extra horizontal line across the upright.

I tossed it up and caught it and put it in my pocket. A strange exercise for a church group, shooting down a young forest. And then picking up all the shell casings.

I headed toward the buildings, but before I reached them I heard, coming toward me, the sound of a lot of footsteps, running almost in unison. They burst up a slope and onto the plateau about fifty yards away from me. Seven of them in single file, weapons slung, left hands holding the weapons, right arms swinging. I had the impression of great fitness and great effort. They were young. They wore gray-green coveralls, fatigue caps, ammo belts, and backpacks. One of them saw me and yelled something. With no hesitation they stopped and ran back, spreading into combat patrol interval, spinning, falling prone, right at the dropoff line, seven muzzles aimed at me. I shed the duffel bag and held my arms high.

"Hey!" I yelled. "Hey, what's the matter?"

"Down," a voice yelled. "Face down, spreadeagle. Now!"

The Green Ripper

Once down, I peered up and saw two wallring toward me, weapons still ready, while two others were heading for the buildings, running in a crouching zigzag, in the event I had come with friends.

Hands patted me. I was told to shut up. I was told to roll over. One stood over me, muzzle at my forehead, and I suddenly realized she was female. The other, a man with a drooping mustache, did the frisking.

"Now what the hell are you doing here?" he demanded. "How did you get here? What did you do to Nicky?"

"The way I got here, I walked. I didn't see any Nicky."

"You come past the gate?"

"Yes."

"Can't you read? Didn't you see the signs?"

"I saw them. But I had to come up here and tallc to somebody about my little girl. She joined up here. Maybe you know her. Kathy McGraw? [m her daddy, Tom McGraw."

"Oh, for God's sake," the man said. The girl didn't relax her weapon.

"Can I get up?"

"Shut up," the girl said. "What are you going to do, Chuck?"

"What the hell can we do? Put him in C Building and wait for Pers to get back."

135

John D. MacD0~11d

The girl gasped and said, "Oh, Jesus! Look at what's coming, Chuck."

A huge young blond man was coming across the field, carrying a fair-sized dead buck across his shoulders.

"God damn you, Mcky, why'd you leave the gate?"

He approached and eased the deer to the ground, rolled his shoulders to loosen them. "And this man came in, huh? Oh, great! I ought to kick you loose from your head, fellow."

"You're the one should be kicked, Nicky," the girl said.

"That sucker came right out onto the road and looked at me and ran back in. I shot too fast and missed and gutshot him, and you can't leave an animal go running off like that. I followed him a mile and a half, fast as I could go. What'd you expect me to do, Nena? I killed him, gutted him, and brought him in."

"It isn't what I expect you to do," she said. "It's what Brother Persival expects."

"You can get up," Chuck said.

After I stood up, I looked at Nicky. His face was troubled. "Boring damn duty," he said. "Hang around down there eight hours at a time. Nobody ever comes. And then when you leave for a couple minutes, some damn fool climbs the fence."

"He's hunting his daughter. She used to be here," Chuck said.

136

The Green Kipper

'what was her name?" Nena asked me. She appeared to be in her early twenties. Olive skin, slender face, very dark eyes. She had that excess of bursting health which gives the whites of the eyes a bluish tint. No makeup. The long dense black lashes were her own.

"Katherine McGraw. She'd be twenty years old by now. Reddish-brown hair and blue eyes and some freckles when she was younger. Maybe they went away."

"Got a picture of her?"

"The best picture we had of her, it was when she was thirteen, and after Peg died, that was my wife, damn if I could find it. I looked all over for that picture. She was a pretty child. She ought to be a good-looking woman. Her ma was."

"You don't know what new name she took?"

"She never said. In those postcards."

'A can't help you. I don't know if anybody can or wants to, Mr. McGraw. People that join up don't go back to the lives they had before."

"Where did everybody go from here?" I asked.

No answer. They urged me along and shut me up in C Building. It was a cement-block building about ten feet square, with two windows with heavy wire mesh over them. There was a wooden chair, a tree-trunk table, a stained mattress on the floor, and a forty-watt bulb hanging from a cord from the middle of the ceiling. There was a ragged pile of religious comic books, a musty army blanket, a two quart jug of tepid drinking water, and a bucket to use as a toilet. They had taken my belt, shoelaces, and duffel bag. The door was solidly locked. I heard some bird sounds, and that was all. I wondered if they had all left.

Darkness came, and there was a quick light rain on the corrugated roof of my prison. I heard a distant motor noise and tried to decide if it was coming or going. When the sound did not change, I realized it might be a generator, the engine turning over at an unchanging rpm. So I tried my light bulb again, and it went on. It did not help the decor.

Two of them came and unlocked my door. They had a dazzling-bright gasoline lantern, an automatic weapon at the ready, and a tin bowl full of stew. They were two I had glimpsed before at a distance. One was a sallow blond girl with very little chin, and the other was a young man with an Asian cast to his features.

No harm to object. After all, I was Tom McGraw. "Why are you people pointing guns at me all the time? Dame it, I'm not some kind of crimi- nal. I don't like being locked up like this. Where's my stuff you took away from me? I got my rights. You people are all gun-happy."

"Shut up, Dads," the Oriental said, and they closed the door and locked it.

Even though I had to eat it with a little white plastic spoon, I found the venison stew delicious. And it had been a long time since I had enjoyed the

The Green Ripper taste of anything. The lack of interest in eating had leaned me down a little over the past weeks.

There was a cook in the camp. Even a slight taste of wine in the stew. Boiled onions, carrots, celery, tomatoes. And a lot of it. After my dinner I read a religious comic book. All about Samson yanking down that temple. Samson looked like Burt Reynolds. Delilah looked like Liz Taylor. The temple looked like the Chase Bank.

After I turned my light off, I stretched out in my clothes on the dingy mattress and covered myself with the musty sheet. And in the darkness, I went over what I knew. I followed Meyer's injunction. Never mix up what you really know with what you think you know. Don't let speculation water down the proven truths. Leap to conclusions only when that is the only way to safety.

People talking outside my door awakened me. I knew it was late. I realized it was just the changing of the guard. I heard the clink of metal and a yawning good night and went back to sleep.

In the morning I was escorted down to a rushing tumbling icy creek by Nicky and the chinless blonde. She carried the weapon. I carried the soil bucket in one hand and held up my trousers with the other. I had asked politely for my belt, and they told me to shut up. They pointed me to the place on the bank where I could wash out the bucket in the fast water. Then I was allowed to go upstream to a place where I could dash some of the icy water into my face. Big Nicky was sullen. The blonde was trying to cheer him. When he answered, I found out her name was Stella. So I had four names out of the group of eight. They marched me back to C Building, again carrying the bucket, now empty, and holding up my trousers. I asked when they expected Mr. Persival, and they told me to shut up.

An hour later I was given cold scrambled eggs and cold toast on a pie tin, with another plastic spoon. They had changed cooks.

At midmorning I saw an interesting tableau from my window. I do not think they realized that I could see it. I had to get my face close to the screen and look slantwise. Two couples. Nena and a young man. Stella and a young man. Out of uni- form. Casual clothes. Each carried luggage. Suitcase, or small bedroll or duffel bag. Chuck stood off to one side, watching them closely. He had a whistle in his mouth and what was apparently a stopwatch in his hand. I could not understand the instructions he yelled at them. They walked close and lovingly, laughing and talking together, looking at each other, not at their surroundings. When the whistle blew, they would snatch at the luggage, yank it open, remove an automatic weapon, let the luggage fall to the ground, stand with their backs to each other, leaning against each other, almost, in a little deadly square formation, hold the weapons aiming out in four directions, and revolve slowly.

Then they would repack and do it again. I think

The Green Ripper

I watched fifteen rehearsals. Their time improved noticeably. I guessed that they had it down to just about four seconds before Chuck ended the exercise. Four seconds to change from two couples, lounging along, laughing together, to an engine of destruction.

I disobeyed one of Meyer's rules. I made an assumption or two. I assumed that they planned to put on their little act in a crowded place, like an airport or a shopping plaza, and the guns would be loaded, and people would be blown apart while still caught up in a horror of disbelief.

But why? They worked so very hard at it. They seemed so dedicated and intent. These were bright young people, very fit and disciplined. Playing a strange, strange game.

The noon meal was more venison stew. Still tasty.

The black van arrived in the late afternoon. It passed my window before I could see anyone in it. But I saw the gold cross painted on the side.

At least twenty minutes passed before my door was unlocked. Chuck said, "Step and pile everything on the floor right in front of the door here. Fold it and pile it. Everything."

"Damn it all, I want to know why I'm "

"Look. This is an order and it's serious. You want to strip, or be stripped?"

I did as I was told. They backed me into a corner and inspected the room to see if there was any thing of mine hidden in it. That search didn't take long. They went off with everything.

It could have been an hour later before anybody came near me. Then it was Mr. Persival himself. A tall stooped figure, shaggy tousled dark hair flecked with gray. Long face and a lantern jaw. Eyes set deep in the bony sockets. The sports clothes looked unlikely on him, as did the big glasses with the slight amber tint, the boldface watch, water resistant to three hundred feet. He was an actor playing a contemporary Lincoln, or a Vermont storekeeper who'd built one store into a chain. He walked with care, the way the ill walk. The girl called Nena slid into the room with her weapon aimed at my chest and moved over to the side to keep Persival out of the line of fire. She was lithe and quick.

"My name is Persival, Mr. McGraw." A deep voice, soft and gentle. An air of total command, total assurance. "My young associates and I would be grateful for some explanation of this."

He held out a big slow hand, and resting on the palm was the cartridge case I had picked up. I spoke without hesitation, blessing the Susan I had known long ago for teaching me how to live a part. "Explanation? I picked that up out there. I never saw one just like it. I put it in my pocket. I mean, if that's the same one."

'I think we will go outside and you will show me where you found it."

The Green Ripper

"Can I have some clothes?"

"It isn't that chilly yet."

When I hesitated, I saw Nena lower the aiming_ point from chest to belly. I couldn't read anything in her eyes. She walked behind us. Persival walked just out of arm's reach, off to my left.

"And what were you doing over here?"

"I was looking for somebody so I could ask them about the Church of the Apocrypha, Mr. Persival. I wondered if the road I came up went down this side to more buildings, maybe. Then I saw all those trees down there, the way they were busted off at the same height. I went down and looked at them. I saw trees looking like that after we cleared some people out who were trying to ambush us, but the man on point stopped them in time. It was done some time ago. Weeks ago, probably, from the dead leaves and the dry wood. I saw slug marks on the trunk and I could kind of figure where the weapon must have been. Or weapons. Right over here. So I saw a glint in a crack in the rocks. Here, I think. No, it was this one. Because here is the twig I hooked it out with. It was a kind I never saw before, so I put it in my pocket. And now you've got it."

He nodded at me and smiled in a kindly way. "You were just wandering around here, At. McGraw?"

"Looking for somebody to talk to."

He sighed and said, "Yes. Looking for somebody to talk to."

"Then I was walking toward the buildings when the patrol came up onto the flat right over there."

'withy do you call it a patrol?"

"I don't know. People in uniform carrying weep" ons and ammo, wearing light packs. Not enough for a squad, and they were coming back out of the country. What would you call them?"

"Followers of the true faith."

"Well, I wouldn't know that. I would like to know something about my little girl and how I can find her."

"Let's walk back. It's getting chilly."

"I'd appreciate that," I said. If there is any way to feel more naked than standing out in 60-degree weather as the day is ending, with a girl aiming an automatic weapon at the small of your back, I would not care to hear of it.

On the way back I noticed that he did not walk quite as far out to my left. I could have reached him, if I felt suicidal.

"You were carrying a considerate amount of cash in the double lining of that duffel bag, Mr. McGraw."

"I was hoping you wouldn't look that close."

"We're very careful people. Is it stolen?"

"Hell, no, it's not stolen! Or maybe it is now, hah?"

"Don't become agitated, please. Just tell me

The Green Ripper where you got it." I told him. He thought it over and nodded. "So you decided to make your funds last as long as possible, so your search would not be hampered by the need to seek employment."

"That's exactly correct."

We went inside. He sat on the straight chair and told the girl to go get my clothes. She hesitated, and he looked stonily at her and said, "Sister?" She scuttled away. She brought the clothing. Persival sent her away. He watched me dress. He said, "You seem to have suffered an extraordinary number of wounds, Mr. McGraw. Are they all service-connected?"

"No, sir, not all. Two are. High on my back on the right side and the shoulder. And here on the left hip."

"How about that huge wound on your right thigh?"

'What was a hunting accident long ago. I went a long time before they found me. It got infected, and I was out of my head and nearly died. Some of this other stuff, I'm in kind of an active line of work. And the guys I work with, when we play we play rough. Beside that, sir, I have a bad temper sometimes. I go out of my head, sort of. I haven't kilt anybody, but I've tried hard."

"You don't seem to have the hands of a commercial fisherman."

I held my hands out and looked at them, backs and fronts. "What do you mean? Oh, you mean like those old boys that go out in the freezing water off of Maine or someplace? They get those big paws like catcher's mitts, and those busted twisted fingers. My daddy had hands like that from working the big nets. It's all nylon now, and you have to wear tough gloves or cut yourself to ribbons. Besides, I haven't been out working the nets for a long time now."

"You seem to be in excellent shape, Mr. McGraw."

"I'm not as good as I'd like to be. You know, the old wind. And the legs give out first. But I've always stayed in pretty good shape. Never had a beer belly."

"And you have had combat experience?"

"As a grunt. I can do the BAR, mortars, flame, mines, whatever. I was in it fourteen months. Got to be a utility infielder."

"Then you must have watched our little... patrol with a practiced eye. Would you have any comment?"

"I haven't seen much. They're trained down fine, physically. They move quick and they move well. They carry the weapons at the ready. But all the rest of it? I don't know what they can do. They look good. What are they training up to do any- way?"

"Please sit down there, on the mattress, Mr. McGraw. Make yourself comfortable." He hitched the straight chair closer and leaned over, forearms

The Green Ripper resting on his knees, long fingers dangling. '] will do you the courtesy of speaking to you with absolute frankness."

"Something happened to my little girl?"

"Please. I wouldn't know about that, nor even how I could find out. I am trying to tell you that if I were to follow my own rules, I would have my young associates take you out into the tall trees and blow your head off."

"Why? Why the hell would you do that?"

"You came stumbling and bumbling in here through an entrance that should have been guarded. The young man responsible will be punished. But I am not taking pity on your innocence and your naive quest. I am thinking of sparing you only because I believe there is some specific use I can make of you."

"Such as what?"

"Are you in any position to ask me that, right now?"

"I reckon not, if you don't want me to, Mr. Persival."

It was getting so dark I could hardly see his face. I could see a pale reflection of the after-dusk sky in his tinted glasses. He had a strange weight and force about him. Total confidence and a total im- partiality.

The distant engine started. The overhead bulb flickered, glowed, brightened. He stood up and stared down at me, then turned on his heel and left, leaving the door open. I walked out and stood with my thumbs hooked in my belt, looking at the faint glow in the western sky, above the sharp tips of the big pines far down the slope. I had the feeling I was being watched, and that it had been set up before Persival paid his call. I yawned and stretched, scratched myself, and slouched back into C Building, wondering if I should have pushed the money question a little harder. Would Tom McGraw have pushed it? Not when faced with the possibility of getting shot in the head.

I wondered when they were going to bring me something to eat, and if it would be the stew again.

Then I heard them all coming. They had flashlights and lanterns. I tightened up, and then heard laughter.

The sallow blonde arrived first, carrying a camp stool and a cooking pot and a flashlight. "We're having a party, Brother Thomas! At your house!"

"So come right in, Sister Stella. Come right in," I said.

148

10 They filled the room. They brought stools and cush ions, a gasoline lantern, food, and wine. Nine of them and one of me. Plastic paper plates and genu ine forks. Paper cups and a big container of coffee. Jolly and smiling. I knew Chuck, the patrol leader, and three of his six soldiers Nena and Stella and the Oriental. I learned that the Oriental was Sammy. The other three were Haris, a slender blond Englishman the name pronounced to rhyme with police and Barry, a young black with a shaved head and dusty tan coloring, and Ahman, who looked like a young Turkish pirate. Persival was there, and also Alvor, one I had not seen be fore. He was chunky, with a broad gray heavy face, 149

John D. I\fi&cDonald colorless eyes and lips, mouse hair, and huge shoulders. I made certain I got all the names right. Alvor had to have been in the van with Persival. Nicky was missing, and I overheard a comment that indicated he was down at the gate as a lookout.

I was sitting on the narrow mattress, leaning back against a cushion, with Nena and Stella on ei- ther side of me. I was the center of all attention. When I remarked that it had certainly seemed like a very strange Christmas day, they reacted as if I had said something profound and witty. We had Christmas toasts in a sharp California red. I was being touched by the young women beside me, not in any sensuous way, but with little pats of affection, of lacing. And when the men would squat in front of me to talk directly to me, they would slap me on the side of the leg, give my ankle a squeeze. Wherever I looked there was someone maintaining direct eye contact with me, projecting warm am proval. I tucked McGee's suspicions into the back of my mind. Brother Tom McGraw was a lonely man, of lonely habits. So I responded to warmth. And to Battery.

'A knew at once you are a highly intelligent and sensitive man, Mr. McGraw," Persival said. 'I could sense that about you. But you seem to feel the need to conceal the real you from the outside world. We are not like that here. We're together."

"In school I never got past "

"Public education in this country means less than

The Green Ripper nothing," Sammy said. "From the earliest grades, the children are taught to conform, to be good con- sumers, to have no interest in their government or the structure of their society. The rebels drop out. The rich get classified as exceptional students and go on to the schools which teach them how to run the world, their world. Never apologize for dropping out, Brother."

The stew was beef this time. I said it was great. Haris, the Englishman, had cooked it. "Whatever there is, we share. Always," he said.

"You're a worker," Nena told me. "You have a skill. You use your skill to feed the people. Even though you are exploited, it's still something to be proud of."

Mr. Persival said, with poetry and force, 'iWe can guess that there have been Christmas nights like this in mountain country all over the world, little groups of determined people, meeting together, all of them willing to give their lives for their beliefs. In the Cuban mountains. In the mountains of Honduras. Mexico, Yugoslavia, Chile, Peru, Rhodesia. Together, sharing, living the great dream."

'~Vhat's the dream?" I asked.

"The same as yours, of course," said Persival. "Freedom for all people of all colors. An end to imperialist exploitation. To each according to his needs. You are the kind of man who, once committed, would give his life for what he believes."

"I've been known as stubborn. I don't give up easy. But what you were saying there, sir, isn't that kind of Commie?"

He shook his head sadly. "Communist, Socialist, humanist, Christian Democrat, Liberation Army. The tags mean less than nothing, Brother Thomas. We do God's work. We are the militant arm of the Church of the Apocryphal We are the ones who have been tested. We work for mankind against the exploiters, deceivers, the criminal warmongers. We will win if we have to tear down the entire structure of society. Your daughter believed in the cause or she wouldn't have joined us."

"She wasn't much for destroying things."

"Most of the people in the Church are gentle people. We are the elite. We're pleased with you, Brother Thomas. We may have a mission for you."

It was at that point I began to feel very strange. At first I thought it was because the room was airless, even with the door standing wide open. Colors got brighter. People's faces began to bulge and shrink, bulge and shrink. My tongue thickened. They had popped me with something. It turned the world into fun-house mirrors. And I knew it could give me a better chance of getting my head blown apart. I made my tongue sound thicker than it was. I began to do as much inconspicuous hyperventilation as I could manage. More oxygen never hurt anything. I crawled across to the water jug, sat and upended it and drank heavily, and crawled back. I

The Green Ripper tipped over my wine by accident and held my glass out for more.

By then we were into recitations of training, with the freedom fighters standing up and declaiming their background.

Nena stood very straight and said in a paradeground voice, "Basic training at Kochovskaya. Guerrilla training at Simferopol. Selected by World Federation of Democratic Youth in Budapest. Transport arranged by World Federal Trade Unions in Prague."

When she sat down everyone applauded. Ahman stood up and said, "Basic and guerrilla training PLO Camp Three in Jordan and Camp Nine in Lebanon. Graduate, University of Maryland." Applause.

Barry had been trained in Cuba by the DGI and had been a weapons instructor at Baninah near Benghazi in Libya. Chuck had trained at a camp near Al-Ghaidha in South Yemen, along with people from the IRA. Sammy had trained in the U.S. Marine Corps and later in the Cuban training center near Bagdad, where the famous Carlos was an adviser. Persival interrupted to give Carlos's correct name, Ilyich Rameirez Sanchez. Stella had been in the Weather Underground and had trained in their mountain camp in Oregon, and later in Bulgaria.

"How," I said heavily, "how these great people get to go so many crazy places inna worl' anyhow?"

"We selected them, Brother Thomas. We tested them, and we selected them, and we sent them away to be trained and come back to us. We sent them as delegates, most of them, to the World Peace Council meetings in Helsinki, or the World Federation of Democratic Youth in Budapest. You see only a few here. There are scores of them, Brother Thomas. Travel is easily arranged for them. The Church provides the funds, of course. They are pledged to make this a better world. They are saviors of mankind."

I mumbled something unintelligible and slowly toppled over to my left to land with my head in Stella's lap, eyes closed, breathing slowly and heavily. I hoped the show would continue. I wanted to hear more. But my collapse broke it up. They picked up all their gear and the dishes and left, after covering me up and turning out the light. I heard the locking of my door. My head was still thick with whatever it was they had given me. I did some fast pushups in the darkness, and a series of knee bends. My knees creaked and breath came fast. But it helped a little. I slept heavily.

I awakened once before daylight and did not know where I was. It alarmed me. Then I remembered. And I remembered the way Gretel and I had talked about what to do on our first Christmas together. We had decided to take the Flush down to the lower end of Biscayne Bay and find a protected anchorage with maximum privacy and swim, and

The Green Ripper eat, and drink, and exchange Christmas greetings all day long.

No breakfast arrived. I pounded on the door and did some yelling. At about ten o'clock they unlocked the door and shoved Nicky in, with such force that he ran across the room and smacked the cement wall with his palms. He had a purple cheek, with the right eye swollen almost shut.

He sat in the chair and slumped over, staring at the floor.

"What's going on?" I asked him.

"Damn bastards are all uptight. Do it by the book. No variations permitted. According to them, I've tucked up twice in a row, which is twice too many times, but they won't even listen. One lousy weapon. One lousy Czech machine pistol, and I forgot to clean it after it was in the creek. For Chrissake, they've got a whole damn building full of weapons, grenades, plastique, nitro, napalm, and God only knows what else. One rotten pistol." He peered up at me with his good eye. "You tucked up too, eh? Or you wouldn't be locked in."

"I did? I don't know how. I got a little drunk."

"Percival doesn't think you're who you say you are, so they were going to give you some love-buzzing and open you up some, and then try some kind of Pentothal stuff he uses. You must have slipped up. Who the hell are you anyway?"

'`Thomas McGraw, dammit! Looking for my girl, dammit! Are you crazy or something? I like an your fAends. I don't know why they locked me up again. It don't make sense."

"You must have slipped up, or you wouldn't be here. That's all I know. Except I know I slipped up once too often. The way I am, when there's no action, I relax. I can't stay wound up all the time. These characters are gung-ho every minute. Like a bunch of cheerleaders. You like them, huh? Because they spent the evening liking you. That's the way it works. Barry, Sammy, and Ahman have had some action. Not much. Chicken-shit operations. Car bombs and burn-downs. In and out, like thieves. I had time in Nam, and then Zambia. We were in the hills near Refunsa. The way it worked, the Zambians would cross into Rhodesia and hit and run, and then suck the Rhodesian army units into Zambia, and we'd ambush them. Very tough people. Very tough country. I just can't stand waiting around so long with no action. I get sloppy. Persival says we don't move until maybe summer. Coordinated You never get to know much. You hear there are fifteen groups and then you hear forty. Who knows? When it comes time, we'll get the word from Sister Elena Marie."

4'Who?"

'4I forgot you don't know. The boss lady. They send out cassettes. I don't believe in a lot of this stuff, but I believe in her. I believe in her all the way." His voice and face were solemn.

There were questions I wanted to ask, but they

The Green Ripper were not questions Tom McGraw would have asked.

"Do you think this Sister Elena Marie would know where my little girl is?"

"I don't know. I don't even know if they've got any central records. I don't know where she is, even, where she makes the tapes. They say there were like three hundred of them here at one time, and this was a small retreat compared to the others. They moved them out to where they could help raise the money. Everybody has to do that. Your daughter had to do it too. Teams go up and down the streets, hitting every house. Sometimes you say it's for children, and sometimes for foreign missions. You sell stuff. Handicraft stuff. Also candy and artificial flowers and maybe fresh-baked bread. Once you catch on, it isn't hard. Four on our team, we'd raise two hundred, three hundred a day, every day. Ride around in the black vans with the crosses. Twenty cents' worth of junk candy for two dollars, to help the starving Christian children in Lebanon. You can claim one quarter of what your team raised when you have to stand up in the meeting and shout out what you turned in. They switch the teams around a lot. I'm so big people were always glad I was on their team. It's harder to say no to big people."

The door opened again. Four of them were there. Ahman and Sammy were in their coveralls, carrying the automatic weapons, left hands clamped on the forestock, right hands around the trigger assembly, long curved clips in place. Persival looked unlikely in an orange-yellow leisure suit and white turtleneck. Stone-faced, no-color, big-shouldered Author wore a wrinkled dark business suit, a white shirt with a frayed collar, and a narrow striped tie.

"Come along," Persival ordered. The four of them walked a dozen feet behind us. Persival told us where to go. We went to the place where the flats sloped down to the splintered trees, near the spot where I had found the cartridge case.

"Stop there," he said. "Move to your right two steps, McGraw. Now both of you turn slowly around and face me."

My heart gave an extra thump. Ahman and Sammy were aiming the weapons at us. Sammy was holding on Mck, and Ahman on me. Ahman's swarthy face and shiny black eyes revealed nothing. So maybe, when Persival had told somebody to check me out, they had checked more carefully than I had assumed they would, and found that Thomas McGraw had been dead for some time, and never had a daughter.

"What the hell is the matter with you people now?" I asked. I did not have to fake a definite quaver in my voice.

"You know, each of you, why you are dying today."

"Chicken shit," Nicky said in a husky voice.

'where can be no carelessness. None. Maximum

The Green Ripper precautions will be taken to prevent any premature disclosure. There will be no second chance for anyone whose actions could compromise us all. All orders will be obeyed, without question, without argument."

"Chicken shit," Nicky said again.

"Come here, Mr. McGraw," Persival said. "Over here. Stop there. Fine. Now turn and face the condemned." I was three feet from Persival, but I noted as I turned that Ahman's gun muzzle followed me like an empty steel eye socket.

Persival's voice deepened. "Dear God of wrath and mercy, take unto thy bosom this soldier of our faith and grant him eternal peace. We send him to thee now so that he will not further endanger the holy mission with which thou hast entrusted us, thy faithful soldiers in the army of justice. Amen.

His hand appeared in front of me, holding a slender automatic pistol with a long barrel. "Take it and shoot him in the head, please," Persival said. Same tone of voice as he would have said, "Have some more stew, please."

And the scenario was suddenly clear. I would shoot Mcky in the head with a blank, and my obedience would remove Persival's lingering suspicion of me, and Nicky would be frightened into being more careful next time. Two birds with one fake stone.

"It's ready to go," he said. "Just aim and fire."

There was no great need to aim. Nicky was per haps fifteen feet from me. If you aim a handgun with the same motion you use to point your finger at someone, if the barrel becomes your finger, you can hit a six-inch circle on the other side of the room ninety-nine out of a hundred times.

So I pointed and fired. It made an unimportant snapping sound. A dark spot appeared beside Nicks nose, on his good cheek. It snapped his head back a little. He made a coughing sound and sagged down onto one knee, then rolled over backward and rolled down the slope. I moved forward to keep him in sight. He came to rest in dead branches, against a splintered trunk, his back to us. One leg jumped and quivered and vibrated for a few seconds and then subsided. He seemed to become visibly smaller.

The life had gone out of him, now and forever. Persival reached around and tugged the weapon out of my hand and moved back away from me. '`Turn around slowly," he said. This was not the scenario I had envisioned. I had imagined all of them crowding around me, Nicky included, whacking me on the back, welcoming me to the team.

Instead, Persival was chucking a magazine into the pistol. The slide had remained back after I had fired. So there had been just the one shell in the chamber. This man took no chances. They held weapons on me. Ahman had set his weapon aside and was collapsing an SX-70 Polaroid while Sammy examined the print as it developed. I re