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.
