smoldering and reminding Keyes of some just-lit giant firecracker that might or might not go off.
After completing his second account, Keyes asked, “Any questions?”
“Questions?” Pall said, snapping the word in two. “Well, yeah, friend, I’ve got a couple or three. You offered this kid, Granville Haynes—”
“He’s thirty-two and scarcely a kid.”
“—this kid fifty K for his old man’s memoirs, but he turns it down because he’s already turned down a hundred K from God knows who and thinks he can raise enough foreign money to produce a flick about his old man’s life with him playing the lead?”
When Keyes remained silent, Pall said, “Well?”
“Was that a question?”
“What the fuck did you think it was?”
“A rather pithy recapitulation.”
“Is that what happened?”
“Essentially. Yes.”
“Okay. You believe any or all of it?”
“Without evidence to the contrary, I don’t disbelieve it.”
“Let’s go back to the French broad, what’s her name, Gelinet? Was she killed over the Haynes manuscript?”
“I’m not positive,” Keyes said, “but it seems sensible to assume she was, which is why I had that offer made to young Mr. Haynes.”
“What were you going to use for money?”
“Discretionary funds.”
“Who’d you clear it with?”
“Nobody.”
“Why the hell not?”
“There was no need,” Keyes said. “If our offer was turned down by Haynes the younger, as, in fact, it was, then we were dealing in imaginary money. In other words—”
Pall cut him off. “Okay, okay, I’ve got it.”
Rage again surfaced in Pall’s green eyes as he leaned forward, rested his arms on the desktop and clasped his hands together so tightly that they turned pale from lack of circulation. He also locked eyes with Keyes, who stared back calmly, taking note of Pall’s barely suppressed rage and, just below it, something else, which Keyes quickly diagnosed as fear.
The stare-down was ended by Pall, who gave his watch a quick glance and asked a question. “It ever occur to you that somebody might be trying to run a shitty past us?”
“My very first thought.”
“Then why’d you fold so quick and ask DOD to bury him at Arlington?”
“One, because I knew Steady well. Very well. And two, because I know a bargain when I see one. The blackmail price was cheap—a plot of land. The blackmail threat was grave because if Haynes’s memoirs do exist, and if they reveal what he actually did, their publication could cause serious political embarrassment. Extremely serious. So that’s why I folded and asked DOD to have the Army bury him with a bugler blowing ‘Taps’ over his grave.” Keyes paused. “If you don’t like it, of course, you can always dig him up.”
“We’ll leave him lie for now,” Pall said. “But let’s go back to the mystery offer—the one for a hundred K.”
“We have only young Haynes’s word on that.”
“You believe him?”
“I have no reason not to.”
“Next question: who else wants to buy ’em and why?”
“There’re two possibilities,” Keyes said. “The prospective buyer could be someone—and by that I mean an individual, a group, even a country—who feels that publication of the memoirs would cause unacceptable repercussions. Or it could be someone who simply wants a club to beat the administration over the head with.”
“The fucking Democrats maybe?”
“That hadn’t occurred to me.”
“I bet,” Pall said, frowned and asked, “You claim Steadfast Haynes never worked for us officially and was always paid in either cash or gold, right?”
Keyes nodded.
“Well, if there’s no record, why don’t we just say we never heard of the son of a bitch?”
“Because I must assume that Steady had acquired proof to the contrary.”
An almost wistful note crept into Pall’s voice when he asked, “Isn’t it possible that the Haynes stuff isn’t nearly as bad as you think?”
