Why Me?

15

When Malcolm Zachary got mad, he got mad like an FBI man. His jaw clenched so four-square and rock-hard he looked like Dick Tracy. His shoulders became absolutely straight and right-angled and level with the floor, as though he were wearing a cardboard box from the liquor store under his coat. His eyes became very intense, like Superman looking through walls. And when he spoke, little muscle bunches in his cheeks did tangos beneath the skin: " Mo-log-na," he said, slowly and deliberately. " Mo-log-na, Mo-log-na, Mo-log-na."

"I couldn't agree more, Mac," said Freedly, whose manner when enraged was exactly the reverse. Freedly's eyebrows and moustache and shoulders became all slumped and rounded, as though gravity were overcoming him, and he got the look in his eye of a man trying to figure out how to get even. Which he was.

Zachary and Freedly had also failed to watch the right TV news at six o'clock, or in fact any news at all, because they were in conference at that time with Harry Cabot, their liaison from the CIA, a smooth fiftyish man with a distinguished handsomeness and an air of knowing more than he was saying. Fresh from suborning an overly enlightened Central American government, Cabot had been rewarded for a dirty job well done by being given this soft assignment in New York: funneling to the FBI some of the CIA's data on various foreign insurgent groups potentially involved with the Byzantine Fire. He was, in fact, just speaking about the Armenians, in an amused and dismissive but not entirely comprehensible manner, when the phone rang in Zachary and Freedly's small office here on East 69th Street, and the blow fell: Chief Inspector Mologna had given a statement to the press.

"Harry, we're going to have to look at this," Zachary said. He had white spots beside his nose and the general air of a man whose parachute doesn't seem to be opening.

"I'll come with you," Cabot said.

So the three of them went down to the monitor room, where news programs were watched and taped, and the tape of the Mackenzie-Mologna interview was run for them, and that's when Zachary's jaw became very square and Freedly's moustache became very drooped.

The part that galled the most was where Mologna thanked the FBI for its assistance in "rounding up" the jeweler Skoukakis and the arrested Cypriots, implying very clearly that it was the New York Police Department which had done the lion's share of the said rounding up. "They weren't even in the case!" Zachary cried. "They've never been in the case! Running around after second-story men!"

They watched the tape to the end, then watched it through a second time, and in the ensuing silence Freedly said, thoughtfully, "Has he blown security, Mac? Do we have a complaint over his head, to the Commissioner?"

Zachary thought about that for a second or two, then reluctantly shook his head. "There was no lid clamped," he said. "We naturally assumed we were all gentlemen, that's all; we'd agree on a joint announcement at the proper time." (In fact, Zachary had been planning a unilateral announcement of his own late tomorrow morning—being federal, he naturally thought in terms of the national media, requiring an earlier deadline—and part of his rage was at Mologna having stolen a march on him.) "Let's go back upstairs," he said, lunging to his feet like an angry FBI man. He thanked the monitor room technicians in a curt but manly way, and they left.

In the elevator Freedly, still casting about for revenge, said, "Well, has he hampered our investigation?"

"Of course he has! The son of a bitch."

"Well, then."

The elevator door opened and they headed down the corridor. Harry Cabot said, "If I were Chief Inspector Mologna—" (he pronounced it right) " — and I were charged with hampering your investigation, I would point out that you people are concentrating on foreign nationalist groups. By publicly stating that the investigation is aimed at domestic thieves, I have lulled your actual suspects and therefore aided your investigation."

"Shit," said Zachary.

"Ditto," said Freedly.

Back in the office, Zachary sat at his desk while Freedly and Cabot shared the sofa. Zachary said, "When we turn up the ring, Bob, when we rub Mo-log-na's nose in it that it wasn't one of his hole-in-corner little burglars, we'll have our own little press conference."

Freedly made no response. He merely sat there, a very dubious look on his face. Zachary said, "Bob?"

"Yes, Mac?"

"You don't think it was just a burglar, do you?"

"Mac," Freedly said, with obvious reluctance, "I'm not sure."

"Oh, Bob!" Zachary said, in a tone of utter betrayal.

"It wasn't the Greeks," Freedly said. "According to Harry here, it's looking more and more like it wasn't the dissident Turks. It's pretty surely not the Armenians."

"There's still the Bulgarians," Zachary said.

"Ye-ess."

"And our friends of the KGB. And the Serbo-Croats. And it still could be the Turks. Couldn't it, Harry?"

Cabot nodded, more in amusement than agreement. "The Turks are still a possibility," he said. "Remote, but possible."

"Hell, Bob," Zachary said, "there's groups out there we haven't even thought about yet. What about the Kurds?"

Freedly looked astonished. "The Kurds? What've they got to do with the Byzantine Fire?"

"They've been in opposition to Turkey a long time."

Cabot cleared his throat. "For the last thirty years," he gently pointed out, "the Kurds' main revolt has been against Iran."

"Well, how about Iran?" Zachary looked around like a hungry bird. "Iran," he repeated. "They poke their nose into just about everything in that Black Sea area. Particularly with the Shah out and the religious nuts in."

Freedly said, "Mac, there hasn't been the slightest rumble from Iran. If there was, Harry would know about it."

"That's true," Cabot said.

"Irani insurgents, then."

Agreeably, Cabot said, "Another possibility, of course, though rather remote." Seeing that Zachary was about to ring in yet another nation or band of dissidents, Cabot raised a restraining hand and said, "Still, the point has been adequately made. We are nowhere near the end of potential foreign suspects. When this unfortunate news in re Inspector Mologna arrived, however, I was just finishing my discussion of the more likely of these groups, and I'd intended to segue to another and perhaps equally important topic."

Zachary restrained himself with the greatest difficulty. He bubbled with undeclared Kazaks, Circassians, Uzbeks, Albanians, Lebanese, and Cypriot Maronites, all of whom made him mutely fidget and squirm at his desk, picking up pencils and paperweights, then putting them down again.

Having bludgeoned the previous conversation to death with practiced civility, Cabot said, "Whichever of our Free World allies turns out to be responsible for this theft, if any, the fact is that just about every group we've mentioned, and some we haven't discussed as yet, has become active since the theft. So far, we know of the entrance into this country in the last twenty-four hours of a Turkish Secret Police assassination team, a Greek Army counterinsurgency guerrilla squad, members of two separate Cypriot Greek nationalist movements (who may spend all their time here gunning for one another and therefore fail to become a substantive factor from our point of view), two officers of the Bulgarian External Police, a KGB operative with deep connections to the Cypriot Turk nationalist movement, and a Lebanese Christian assassin. There is also the rumored arrival via Montreal of two members of the Smyrna Schism, religious fanatics who broke away from the Russian Orthodox Church in the late seventeen hundreds and live in catacombs under Smyrna. They are rumored to favor the beheading of heretics. In addition, various embassies in Washington—the Turkish, Greek, Russian, Yugoslav, Lebanese, some others—have requested official briefings on the matter. At the UN, the British have called for—"

"The British!" Surprise unsealed Zachary's lips. "What've they got to do with it?"

"The British take a proprietary interest in the entire planet," Cabot told him. "They think of themselves as our landlords, and they have called for a United Nations fact-finding team to assist the rest of us in our investigations. They have also volunteered to lead this fact-finding team themselves."

"Good of them," Zachary said.

"But the main problem right now," Cabot said, "aside from the loss of the ring itself, of course, is all these foreign gunmen running around New York, hunting the ring and one another. This theft is enough of an international incident as it is; Washington would be very displeased if New York were turned into another Beirut, with shooting in the streets."

"New York would be displeased, too," Freedly said.

"No doubt," agreed Cabot.

Acidly, Zachary said, "Mo-log-na could give another press conference."

Unexpectedly, Cabot chuckled. The other two, seeing nothing amusing anywhere in the visible landscape, looked at him with annoyed surprise. "I'm sorry," Cabot said. "I was just thinking, what if Inspector Mologna were right? What if some passing burglar, uninterested in Cyprus or Turkey or NATO or the Russian Orthodox Church or any of it, just happened to pick up the Byzantine Fire in the course of his normal operations? And now the world is filling up with police forces, intelligence agencies, guerrilla bands, assassination teams, religious fanatics, all pointed at that poor bastard's head." With another chuckle, Cabot said, "I wouldn't want to be him."

"I wish Mo-log-na was him," Zachary said.