The Liquidator

Three

He was waiting for me when I walked into the terminal, a tall man with a ruddy complexion and tousled dark hair that had just a touch of gray in it. His handshake was cordially firm, but from the feel of his leathery palm, I got the impression he could squeeze a bar of silver into a roll of dimes. He had a merry, impish face, eyes dancing constantly, and his comfortably broad middle was no wider than his equally broad shoulders. Even before he spoke, I knew why he was working for AXE; Nathaniel Frederick was clearly a man who had been there and back, and had loved every minute of it.

“You’re lucky,” he was saying as we left the terminal and headed for his ancient station wagon parked just outside. “Your plane was on time. Usually the flights from Washington can be counted on to arrive at least an hour late.”

“Maybe you’re the lucky one,” I said. “You didn’t have to wait.”

“Oh, I don’t mind waiting.” He patted the black briefcase he held under one arm. “I always come prepared to while away idle moments.”

If that remark was supposed to make me curious, it worked. But I decided to hold back until I had a clearer picture of the man who looked like anything but a retired New England schoolteacher. As he started the noisy but smoothly-running engine, I studied his profile for a moment. No more than mid-fifties, I estimated, and that made me do some more thinking. Retired? He looked as though he could keep going until he was eighty, and probably then some.

He drove steadily, with casual skill, negotiating the streets and highways until we broke clear of the city. I knew almost nothing about this part of the country, except that once I’d been sent to Brown for a special course. It was the middle of winter, and winters in Providence can make a man long to be just about anywhere else. Once I’d been to Newport, cruising with some friends in a boat that could legitimately be called a yacht, but I never even made it ashore during our overnight stay.

“What’s the drill?” I asked as an opener.

Nathaniel glanced at me. He was definitely not the sort of man you would call Nat “Well, you’ll be staying at my house. I’m to take you out sailing every day until you’re as at home at the helm as I’m sure you are at the wheel of a car. Then there are various other things you’ll have to know...”

“Navigation,” I interrupted.

“Oh, that goes with the sailing, and if you need some brushing up on theory, I’ll help you with that, of course. But that’s the easy part.”

“Is that right?”

He grinned, his face lighted by the lights on the instrument panel. “You’ll have to memorize details — size, rigging, optional equipment, and especially prices — of virtually every sailing craft currently for sale in the United States and other parts of the world.”

“All that? What for?”

Nathaniel chuckled. “David told me he hadn’t had time to give you much of a briefing, but I didn’t realize he hadn’t told you anything.”

The man beside me was coming up with a surprise every time he opened his mouth. He was the only person I’d ever heard call the chief by his first name.

“He said you’d fill me in on the details.”

“Only of this part of the operation, of course. And that’s to turn you into a reasonable facsimile of a yacht broker, Mr. Daniel McKee. I don’t know why, and I never expect to find out, so whatever you’ve learned about your operation, please don’t tell me.”

I wasn’t about to, but my own curiosity made me determined to find out everything I could about this overgrown cherub. “I gather you’ve worked with Hawk before.”

“Oh certainly,” he admitted. “We go back to World War II, when both of us worked in Naval intelligence. Well, at least I did; David was... unattached, as we used to say.”

“Uh-huh. And now you teach school?”

“No longer. I retired several years ago.”

I eyed him openly, making sure he was aware of it. “You seem a little young for retirement,” I said bluntly, probing for a reaction.

He just nodded agreement. “That’s true. I’m only fifty-nine. But when my wife died, it made my position awkward at St. Dunstan’s.”

“That’s the school?”

“Yes. You see, boys at prep schools tend to grow attached to certain faculty wives. You know, the afternoon teas, the sort of open-house atmosphere that some places maintain. My wife, I can say without boasting, was perhaps the favorite of all the faculty wives, and when she was gone, I found there was too much... well, let’s say sympathy for me. It became very difficult to teach, and I found it disturbing to have boys in for bull sessions with only myself. So... I retired.”

He spoke matter-of-factly, a little smile on his lips, but he swiped once at his eyes, then cleared his throat loudly.

“You... ah... still live on the campus?” I was less concerned with where he lived than how it might affect my cover; the last thing I wanted to do was have to cope with a bunch of curious schoolboys.

“Oh no. I took a house down by the yacht club on the Sakonnet. Not very large, but it suits my needs, and it’s close enough to the campus so I can expect friends to drop in from time to time. And I do keep busy, Mr. Carter, excuse me, Mr. McKee. Retirement, you know, is the time of life when a man finds the opportunity to do all those things he put off earlier.”

Okay, so he knew my real name. That was no surprise, not after learning how close he was to Hawk. But it seemed to me he was talking too freely to me, and I wondered how far he’d go.

“I guess you’ve done this kind of thing for Hawk before,” I remarked.

He glanced at me quickly. “Not exactly. That is, I don’t run a regular seamanship school for AXE agents, though I’ve taught one or two of your colleagues the fundamentals from time to time.”

“But you’ve... kept in touch all these years.”

He grinned. “You’re probing, Mr. McKee.”

It seemed like a good idea to be frank. “I always like to know as much as possible about the man I’m dealing with. Especially when he’s obviously an old pal of my chief.”

Nathaniel chuckled. “Well, there’s no reason not to tell you a little bit. I have some small talents in various fields that David has been able to make use of when I’ve been available. Aside from boats and sailing, I’m a pretty good photographer, thanks to the Navy and the training they gave me many years ago. And I do travel; even when I was still teaching, I usually sailed to Europe, the Caribbean, even across the Pacific, during those long summers that schoolteachers live for. On my sabbatical — God, nearly ten years ago! — I took my wife and two daughters — grown and left the nest now — on a cruise around the world. David asked me to look into certain things, make contacts... well, you know what I mean. I’m sure you don’t intend to ask me for details.”

“They must be in the agency files.”

“I hope not. The little chores I’ve done for your chief have been personal favors. For an old friend. And as an old friend, David assured me my name would never appear in any AXE file, not even in code. I trust him. Don’t you?”

I nodded. And realized at the same time that I trusted this man as much as anyone I had ever met in my life. Which, of course, bothered me, because a big part of my profession is to be suspicious of damned near everybody I come into contact with.

“That sounds like quite a cover,” I said. “You, the wife, the kids, sailing around the world. What ports did you hit?”

Nathaniel shook a gently chiding finger at me. “Now, now, Nick, don’t start pushing. That was years ago, and whatever little things I did for David are long finished. Besides, I always stayed clean, was never identified as an agent of any sort. And I intend to keep it that way.”

“In that case,” I said wryly, “you’d better remember to call me Daniel McKee.”

“Oh, I won’t forget.”

“And I’m a... yacht broker?”

“That’s the idea. Why don’t we wait until we get to my place before we discuss it any further? It’s starting to rain, and these pesky windshield wipers only smear the water around.”

My efficiency apartment would have fit into the kitchen of Nathaniel Frederick’s “not very large” house. It was a ramshackle structure, two stories, white clapboard, with a wide covered porch running along the back and overlooking a wide body of water. When we arrived, the rain was driving, and I wasn’t at all sure exactly where we were. But I wasn’t worried, not with Nathaniel.

By the time I’d been shown to my upstairs room and had washed up, my host had a fire going in the big, comfortable living room that evidently also served as a study. Books and papers were piled everywhere; one wall was lined with cork, on which were pinned blowups of some of the best boating photographs I’d ever seen. Scattered around on shelves and occasional tables were framed pictures of children in various stages of growing up, and on another wall was a painting of a woman, proudly white-haired but radiantly beautiful. It was only a head-and-shoulders portrait but I knew she was the sort of woman who would draw all eyes away from a parade of Playboy bunnies. My respect for Nathaniel Frederick went up a few more notches; if I’d lost someone like that I sure as hell wouldn’t go around smiling.

“You’re a bourbon man, I understand,” he said.

“You seem to know a lot about me.”

“Yes.” He was standing at a mellow old cellaret, pouring from a cut glass decanter into a jumbo glass.

“Water?”

“Just rocks, thanks.”

We took our drinks — I think his was sherry, but I couldn’t be sure — into the kitchen, where he opened a few cans and whipped up a quick supper that tasted like nothing that ever came out of cans. When I complimented him on it, he waved away the flattery.

“When you’re at sea for weeks at a time in a small boat, Mr. McKee, you devise all sorts of interesting things with beans and corned beef hash. Otherwise you have a mutiny on your hands.”

Afterward we went out to the back porch. The rain was still pelting down, and though the night was chilly, I felt warm and protected under the deep, sheltering roof. A short stretch of sand led down to the edge of the water, where dark wavelets lapped greedily at the shore.

Nathaniel pointed off to our right. “The yacht club. A small place, and we won’t go there right away. For obvious reasons, I keep my own boat at the marina, which is just beyond there. In a few days, when I feel you can pass as a yacht broker, we’ll give you a test at the club.”

“A test?”

“Why not? Did you think I was going to give you a crash course without a final exam?”

I hadn’t thought about that, but I had to agree it seemed like a good idea. On the other hand, I still didn’t know why. So I asked.

“Oh, it’s too late to discuss all that this evening, Mr. McKee. Come back inside a moment.”

We returned to the livingroom, where he took down a book from a shelf. I noticed that there were a number of identical volumes side by side; at least the dust jackets were all the same.

“At the risk of seeming immodest, I’d suggest that you take this with you for bedtime reading,” Nathaniel said. “Even though I wrote it myself, it’s not bad.”

The title was Lines & Spars, and in my hand it felt as heavy as the Manhattan telephone directory.

“Just to get you in the mood,” Nathaniel was saying. “Immerse yourself in the trivial details of fitting out and handling a sailing craft, as long as you can stay awake. But be careful, Mr. McKee.”

There was a different note in his voice that brought me up tense. “Careful?”

He smiled. “Don’t let the book fall on your face as you’re dozing off. It’s heavy enough to break your nose.”

The next few days were a madhouse of physical and mental exhaustion. We sailed Nathaniel’s thirty-nine-foot ketch up and down the Sakonnet River, which isn’t a river at all but an estuary where the tides boil in and out like Colorado River rapids. Well... maybe not quite that violently, but it’s quite an experience to be running with a pretty fair wind astern, all sails flying, and find yourself going backward with the tide. At one point even Nathaniel admitted defeat and turned on the auxiliary motor to help us make it to the dock. That made me feel better. There’s a kind of mystique surrounding deep-water sailors; you get the impression they’d rather drift forever than resort to their engines, but Nathaniel made no apologies.

“If you have to get somewhere,” he said, “get there the best way you can. We’re not racing, and we’re not showing off.”

To test my navigation and all-around boat-handling, we took a cruise that lasted a couple of days. First to Cuttyhunk, which isn’t all that far, but Nathaniel thoughtfully chose a day when the fog was so thick you could almost roll it into little balls and store it. He sat in the cockpit, not too close to me, and read a book while I struggled with the wind and tides and the fact that I could barely see as far as the bow of the ketch. I was pretty proud of myself when we made the buoy marking the entrance to the harbor, but my wily instructor had one more little surprise in store for me; he hadn’t mentioned that a good-sized set of waves breaks right through the harbor entrance, and when we arrived they were big enough to make a surfer’s mouth water.

So I did the smart thing, dropping the sails, no help from Nathaniel, and switched on the auxiliary. He didn’t say a word, but I got the impression he would have done the same thing.

From there we took off for Martha’s Vineyard, spent the night on board in the Edgartown harbor, and left early the next morning for Block Island, a stretch of blue-water sailing with no landmarks in sight. I learned some things about drift and compensation I couldn’t have taught myself in a dozen years, and when the high, dull red cliffs of the island came into view, I was more relieved than smug.

We rounded the island and went into Great Salt Pond, the natural harbor on the west side. It was still daylight, late afternoon, and Nathaniel suggested we go ashore.

“I figured we could make it back to Newport by tonight,” I said.

“No hurry. Have you ever been here before?”

“Never.”

“It’s an interesting place. Let’s go rent a couple of bicycles and take the tour.”

“Bicycles?”

“Of course! It’s the only way to travel when you’re not on the water.”

So we went ashore, tying up at a high dock that was built primarily to accommodate the summertime ferries that run between the island and the mainland. The little cluster of shops and food stands seemed to be closed, but Nathaniel knocked on the door of a weathered, sagging building. A woman opened up; she had a scarlet face, which meant she was either a lifelong lush or had some sort of terrible disease. Anyway, she beamed when she saw Nathaniel, gave him a hug and then escorted us to the rear of the building, where a shed housed a couple of hundred bikes stacked all over each other like jackstraws.

“Take anything you like, Mr. Frederick. Long as they run, huh?”

We dragged a couple of bikes out of the pile, checked them out.

“These will do nicely, Mrs. Gormsen,” Nathaniel said. “We’ll be back in a couple of hours, probably.”

“You stayin’ overnight or sailin’ out?”

“We haven’t decided. Do you want to feed us?”

The woman chuckled heartily. “Oh Lord no, Mr. Frederick. This time o’ the year we mostly live on frozen hot dogs we didn’t sell last summer. You’re welcome to it, but I don’t think you’d want it.”

“I won’t debate that point,” Nathaniel said, swinging a leg over the seat of his bike.

We traveled the main road, a potholed strip of blacktop that ran past vacant, shuttered old hotels and summer boarding houses, any of which might have had their quota of ancestral ghosts lurking behind the blind windows. Block Island is a high piece of land; we traveled past areas that looked like the moors of England, dotted with slate gray ponds. But we weren’t entirely isolated; when we were halfway down the island we encountered a young couple on a tandem bike, pedaling steadily and obviously having a marvelous time. We gave them room, and they waved and laughed, then disappeared into the deepening twilight.

“I didn’t think anybody visited here off season,” I said to Nathaniel.

“Oh, there are always a few oddballs. I rather like to see them around.”

We pedaled on until we reached the far end of the island, a high bluff overlooking the Atlantic. From where we stood, it was an impressive view, maybe a hundred feet down with the waves crashing relentlessly against the rocky shore below. Far off to our left was a lighthouse, its beam just beginning to circle through the gathering night. Nathaniel and I stood for a few minutes, taking in the cool, clean air blowing from somewhere like the Azores. Then we turned back to our bikes.

With the noise of the wind and the waves, we hadn’t heard the car approach; now it stood, headlights out, battered grill nosed against our bicycles. A man stood by the open door on the driver’s side, and behind the windshield I could make out a blur of a face, but I didn’t pay much attention to it. I was a lot more interested in the shotgun the man was pointing in our direction.

“Mr. Frederick?” he asked, his voice weak against the wind.

“Oh my,” Nathaniel said mildly.

“You remember me?”

“I’m afraid so.” Nathaniel didn’t move; he kept his hands at his sides and seemed almost relaxed. “It’s been so long, though...”

“A lot longer for me.” He moved the shotgun slightly in a way I didn’t like. “They didn’t believe me, you know. They thought I was working for your people instead of them, and it was more’n a year before they let me go.”

“You must have had a difficult time.”

“It was living hell! A whole goddam year on that factory ship, and it weren’t no pleasure cruise!”

“No, I don’t imagine so, Graves.” Nathaniel took a half-step toward the man and pointed at the shotgun. “Are you intending to use that?”

“I didn’t come out here for the fresh air.”

I could see now that he was a man in his late thirties, with big-knuckled hands and a seamed face roughened by wind and water. Under his nondescript windbreaker his impressive shoulder muscles bulged.

“How did you happen to find us here?” Nathaniel went on. Another half step.

“Been on the island a couple o’ weeks, ever since they turned me loose. My wife comes from here...”

“Oh, of course. And Mrs. Gormsen is your mother-in-law, isn’t she?”

“You catch on pretty good.” Graves moved forward. “I guess you and your friend best back up to the edge of the cliff there.”

“Are you going to shoot us or do you think you can make us jump?”

“Don’t make no difference to me, Mr. Frederick. I was fixin’ to pay a call on you over to Newport, but you saved me the trouble today.”

“If I’d known our Red fishing friends had let you go, I might have changed my itinerary.” Nathaniel kept that genial half-smile on his face, calm as though he were facing a classroom filled with eager pupils.

“Yeah, well I didn’t figure they’d send you a telegram. You set me up pretty good, Mr. Frederick, and I don’t forget nothin’ like that. Only reason they didn’t kill me was...”

“Because you weren’t terribly important, were you?” The change in Nathaniel’s voice was remarkable; now there was a sneer in it.

It got the reaction. Graves started toward him, his face livid even in the gathering darkness. He swung the shotgun up to use it as a club, and the retired schoolteacher dove in under it. He drove stiff fingers into the man’s gut, using his other forearm to block the blow from the shotgun barrel. Graves doubled over, eyes popping. Nathaniel hit him again in the same spot, this time turning his hand over and nearly lifting the man off his feet, fingers hooked under his sternum. Graves tried to screech, but only a strangled sound of agony came from his wide-open mouth.

Nathaniel took the shotgun from his hand as he let the man sag to the ground. There was a smile of mixed satisfaction and regret on his face as he looked at Graves, writhing in excruciating pain — and he looked a little too long.

The other car door opened, and a woman got out. I could tell it was a woman because she wore pink plastic curlers in her hair; otherwise she was dressed more or less like the man who lay at Nathaniel’s feet. She carried a pistol.

So did I. Wilhelmina, the Luger that was as much a part of me as my right arm, jumped from her shoulder holster. I dove at Nathaniel, knocking him aside as the woman aimed the big old revolver in our direction. Because of the wind and surf I hardly heard the sound of the shot, but felt the searing pain as a bullet ripped a gouge out of my upper arm.

Woman or no woman, I shot her. One clean shot, right through the heart; she was too close for me to miss, and I had no intention of just wounding her.

She dropped like a stone, the revolver falling from her fingers like a toy she’d suddenly grown tired of. Nathaniel was already getting to his feet, the shotgun pointed at Graves.

“Very nice, Mr...ah... McKee. She seemed to know what she was doing with that weapon.” He bent over the woman’s body and shook his head. Then he picked up her pistol and shoved it into his belt. “Now we do have a little problem.”

“Yeah.”

Graves was still writhing at my feet, trying to get up but unable to, any more than he could talk.

“Pity he involved his wife,” Nathaniel was saying. “Or at least I presume that’s who she was. Is that right, Graves?” He bent low over the other, man.

Graves nodded, his face distorted, neck corded.

“Then I suppose you’re not likely to forgive me for her death.” He shook his head pityingly. “No, hardly likely after your performance this evening. So...” He shrugged. “Sorry, Graves.” He reached for the man’s chest, dug relentless fingers under the ribs and kept pushing — higher and higher, probing for the heart until his hand was nearly buried in the flesh. Graves yowled faintly, legs thrashing; Nathaniel casually cuffed him across the face, never relaxing the pressure. Then the man lay still.

The retired teacher stood up, wiped his brow with the back of a hand. “I don’t know if he’s dead or not, but it’s not really important. Will you help me get them back into their unfortunate car?”

It wasn’t the most convincing accident ever staged, but the fact that the old Chevy’s automatic shift had a tendency to snap out of gear made it all a little less implausible. We switched on the ignition, rolled the car to the brink of the cliff, and pushed it over the side. Nathaniel didn’t wait to see it hit the rocks below; it was too dark to see much of anything, anyway.

I looked toward the lighthouse.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “If they’d heard anything, they’d have been here by now. Their concern is what’s happening out at sea, not along the shore. Shall we return the bikes to Mrs. Gormsen?”

The riding wasn’t easy in the dark; my bike light didn’t throw a beam much beyond my front tire, and Nathaniel’s didn’t work at all. But he seemed to know where he was going, and as we rode slowly across the island, he told me what Graves was all about.

“He was a fisherman, boatman, call him what you will. Worked mostly out of Montauk, at the tip of Long Island. Just across there.” He pointed to our left, where I knew there was a stretch of water separating Block Island from the mainland. “Some years ago the Reds recruited him. Common labor, you’d call him in the espionage business. His job was simply to keep his eyes open. There’s a lot of submarine activity around here, for instance; Block Island Sound is a principal access to the Atlantic from the New London sub base. There were other things. Graves worked on charter boats, and quite a lot of people with important government connections come out this way for a few days of relaxation. Even Nixon did when he was campaigning in sixty-eight, you know. At any rate, I was put on to Graves by our mutual friend in Washington, and since I was handy and knew a bit about boats, I was assigned the job of... neutralizing him.” He grinned over at me as we pedaled side by side. “Normally I don’t accept active assignments, but it happened I could use the money Hawk offered.”

“What was that business about a factory ship?” I asked, swerving to avoid a pothole the size of a backyard swimming pool.

“Ah yes, that was how they worked it. As you must know, the fishing fleets of many nations — Russia in particular — are working just a few miles off our shores. What rivalry there is economic rather than ideological, so there’s a fair amount of communication between the various boats, regardless of nationality or politics. So it wasn’t hard for Graves to deliver his reports to one Russian boat or another. But sometimes he would have messages that were urgent, and then he would signal with a light — right from those cliffs where his brakes failed and he and his wife plunged to their deaths...”

“About that,” I interrupted. “Maybe his death can be made to look like an accident, but how about hers? She’s got a nine-millimeter slug in her.”

“Yes, yes. Not very neat. However, at this time of the year that part of the shore is so deserted that if the car is underwater — and it should be — by the time the mishap is discovered there won’t be enough left of the bodies for the local authorities to suspect anything but an accident. If they do, well, that’s what our friend in Washington is for, isn’t it?”

I didn’t have to say anything; this mild-mannered schoolteacher who could kill in cold blood was way ahead of me.

“At any rate,” Nathaniel went on as we started down a long, gradual slope toward the cluster of buildings and docks beyond, “I managed to convince Graves that I was a sympathizer. It wasn’t difficult; he has that sort of mentality — believes schoolteachers are all Communists of one degree or another. Eventually I persuaded him to send a message that would bring one of the fishing boats inside our territorial waters — strictly forbidden, of course. A Coast Guard cutter was standing by, and there was a carefully orchestrated — and futile — chase while I pretended to take Graves prisoner. He escaped, made his way down to the harbor on the other side of this island and stole a power boat to make his getaway. He was successful, needless to say; he located one of the Red trawlers and was taken to the factory ship, which does a bit more than process fish. Frankly, we expected them to take him back to Mother Russia, but evidently their facilities are more sophisticated than we thought.”

We were nearing the row of weathered buildings close to the docks. “Why go to all that trouble?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it have been simpler just to arrest the guy? Or eliminate him?”

“Well, you know the man in Washington; he doesn’t explain anything he doesn’t have to. But my theory is that if we had arrested Graves and tried him, it would have been a senseless exercise. After all, he was merely a local fisherman doing a dirty little job on the side for extra money. A trial could very well have made a martyr of him, and these days we have more than enough of those. On the other hand, if we could convince the other side that he was a double agent, which we seem to have done to some extent, they would be forced to spend a great deal of time and effort in checking out their other common labor to be sure they weren’t all like Graves.”

It was exactly the way I had figured it, so I dropped the subject. “What about her?” We were slowing in front of Mrs. Gormsen’s shuttered hotdog stand and bike-rental emporium.

“I wouldn’t bother,” Nathaniel said. “We had no evidence that she was involved in any way.”

“Somebody told Graves we were on the island.”

“Yes, of course. But even if it was she, it wouldn’t necessarily implicate her. After all, visiting yachtsmen who rent bicycles aren’t exactly common at this time of the year.”

“Well...”

“But I suggest we return to our boat and make for home tonight. There’s no point in making too many assumptions, is there?”