‘So?’
‘So the bullet was soaked in garlic.’
And at almost the same moment that Twigs was telling Friscoe about the stiff in the icehouse with the .22 calibre garlic-soaked bullet in its head, Anderson brought the telex message to Larry Abrams, who was sitting half asleep at his table, staring at the tape he had been studying for hours.
The teletype message woke him up.
‘Here’s that FBI report you were lookin’ for,’ Anderson said. ‘Looks like a dead end.’
‘What do you mean?’ The Nosh said
‘Read it.’
The bureau had made a positive T.D. on the two prints. They belonged to a fifty-nine year-old white male from Lincoln, Nebraska named Howard Burns. But The Nosh did not read any further. His eyes jumped to the bottom line of the report and he stared in disbelief.
According to the FBI report, Howard Burns had been incinerated in an automobile accident on the outskirts of Omaha two months earlier.
Chapter Sixteen
The sleek white Grebe cabin cruiser rolled gently on a quiet sea, protected by a womb of warm fog that had drifted in from the Gulf Stream just after midnight, a fog so thick that it now obscured the crow’s nest over the cabin. Hotchins slipped on a pair of faded corduroys and a yellow slicker and went out on the afterdeck where he sat quietly massaging the calf of his imperfect leg. Occasionally, when tension and weariness weighed on him, he could almost feel the missing foot cramping up on him, the pain spreading slowly up to his knee, the artificial foot becoming a dead weight. It was a discomfort he endured alone, never mentioning it to others.
He had anchored in a cove on the inland side of the island, an unnamed hump of sand and sea grass he remembered from the early days when he worked the shallows off the Georgia and South Carolina coasts with his father. He rarely thought about those days anymore. Time had eased all that, erasing memories of the harsh work and bitter loneliness that were the realities of a shrimper’s life. Now he regarded the sea with affection, a friend providing tiny islands along the coast from Brunswick to Charleston that had become his private hideaways.
He sat in the stern, rubbing the leg, drawing strength from the artificial foot, which had become a constant reminder of the humiliation of defeat, of the common weakness he saw in all people who failed, who dreamed too small, and would not pay the price for even their little dreams. His utter contempt for those who simply endured had started in Korea. There were prices to be paid and the greater the prize, the higher the price.
In the prison camp, where he lay nursing his shattered foot for almost a year before it was amputated, Hotchins had learned about survival. He needed a goal, something more than just day-by-day grovelling to stay alive. His goal, his single driving obsession to be president of the United States, was born in morphine-crazed hallucinations, but it became his goal for living. He invented methods for keeping his mind alert. He tried to think like a president, act like a president, adopt the attitude of a president.
When he was released from the hospital into the prison population, he was shocked at what he found — a motley, demoralized, filthy group who reflected their senior officer, a colonel named Sacks who was a weak and disheartened shell, tormented by fear and sickness and destroyed by his own nightmares. Hotchins watched as Sacks encouraged the weak to submit to the North Koreans, to collaborate, sign confessions, to do anything to stay alive. He hated Sacks, not because he was weak, but because he had created an atmosphere that eventually would enervate Hotchins himself.
If Hotchins were to survive, he had to destroy Sacks. His became a constant and subtle voice hammering at the colonel’s conscience, eroding the last vestige of Sacks’s self- respect. It was an insidious and ruthless campaign, so carefully carried out that when Sacks eventually hanged himself, he did not realize he had been driven to the act by the man who assumed his position of command.
For the next two years Hotchins ruled the camp, hand- picking a small coterie of the toughest men left and establishing his own harsh rules and regulations. He restored military discipline to the prison, demanded that the men practise personal hygiene, that they exercise to keep their morale up. Twice he secretly ordered the execution of men on the verge of confessing to war crimes. He was both a frightening martinet and an inspiration to his fellow prisoners. They survived because he needed them to, and in the end he endured his humiliation with dignity and walked out of the camp a hero.
When he did, he was convinced that he would someday
be president, regardless of the price. It was a passion which
DeLaroza had eased to life, nurtured, encouraged and fed.
And now it was happening. Nothing could stop it. In
Hotchins’s mind, it was destiny.
He sat in the fog, preparing himself for the tough ten months ahead, for the exhausting personal toll he knew the campaign would exact, contemplating the price he would have to pay.
He had already paid dearly by ending his affair with Domino. DeLaroza had been right, she represented a constant danger and a foolish one. Besides, she had served her purpose. Domino had awakened new passions in Hotchins, arousing a latent need that had been smothered by ambition. She had fired his carnal desires ‘with her incredible sensuality and given him a new vitality. Losing her was just the first of many personal sacrifices he knew he would have to make.
The decision to give her up had come quickly once he faced it. Hotchins had trained himself to make fast decisions. He simply programmed the pluses and minuses into his brain, a trick he had learned from Victor. Emotion had nothing to do with it.
It was done. Time to move on.
He started thinking about his own political machine. The nucleus was there, although he recognized that in its strength there was danger. DeLaroza, Roan, Lowenthal, each a shrewd and powerful strategist but each with his own needs to fulfil. It would not be easy, balancing their egoes, keeping the machine oiled and moving.
