“That’s his most ludicrous statement yet,” Bernstein snorted. “Why would the upper echelons of the United States government murder a celebrated former Secretary of Defense?”
I said, “The government didn’t kill Forrestal-you did, Doc … or rather, we did, you and I.”
He laughed, once. “Did you help me, or did I help you?”
“James Forrestal was a threat because he was feeling guilty about sanctioning our government’s collaboration with Nazis; further, he was genuinely mentally ill, and capable of either disintegrating in public, or going public with what he knew, neither of which was particularly desirable. Jim Forrestal was one of your classic men who knew too much, a nightmare of a security risk. Various steps were taken, including leaking forged Majestic Twelve files to Drew Pearson to throw the press off the trail of the real Majestic Twelve, which apparently had to do with saucer experimentation via Nazi collaboration, not unidentified objects from outer space. But however you cut it, Forrestal had to go-not in the government’s opinion, though I’m sure there will be as much relief in private as there is mourning in public. No, this was your call, Doc, protecting your own Aryan ass. Exposure of the extent of our government’s Nazi collaboration could lead to a second series of Nuremberg-like trials; your cushy new life, your Caddy, your house, your prestigious position, it would all go up like so much smoke out an Auschwitz chimney.”
“Nurse Selff,” Bernstein said, his tone temperate, the gaze he gave her radiating reasonableness, “please know these are the ramblings, the ravings, of a very diseased mind.”
“Like me, Maria,” I said, “you were this bastard’s unwitting accomplice. You were still working the Roswell disinformation project, not realizing the good doctor was putting the Forrestal kill in motion.”
Bernstein snapped, “I was nowhere near that hospital when Mr. Forrestal took his life!”
Gun steady on him, I said, “Neither was I, Doc, but we killed him together, just the same.”
Confused, Maria asked, “How is that possible, Nathan?”
“The doc here was well aware that I was a veteran of hypnosis therapy, that my battle-fatigue amnesia had been cured by hypnotherapy, in fact. So he knew I’d make a good subject, easily controlled, by a combination of, well … sex-that’s, uh, your role, Maria … and of course a visit to the base guesthouse. Either before or just after my guesthouse stay, back at Bethesda the doc prepped Forrestal to be receptive to posthypnotic suggestion; how exactly the doc achieved that, narcosis, hypnosis … well, he’s the magician, not me.”
Maria asked, in a hushed voice, “What do you think happened to you in the guesthouse?”
“Well for one thing-and this much you do know, Maria-I was a guest at the base longer than I’d been led to believe … don’t play dumb, baby, that doesn’t become you, either. You told me, when I fell asleep at your bungalow, that I’d slept straight through, losing a day … but really I’d only slept through that one night. Right?”
Chagrined, she nodded.
“You even gave me a posthypnotic suggestion yourself, didn’t you, Maria? Per the doc’s instructions, when you said, ‘You must be very tired, very tired, very tired.’”
“That is true,” she admitted, sending an accusing glare Bernstein’s way.
“That had nothing to do with Forrestal,” he told her emphatically.
I shook my head. “It had everything to do with him, Doc. You had, what, a day, a day and a half to work your magic on me, in that guesthouse?
Now some desperation had found its way into Bernstein’s voice and his demeanor, as he turned to the nurse. “Maria, do you realize how preposterous all of this is? Do you see now that Mr. Heller is suffering from a complete mental breakdown?”
Maria said nothing.
I said, “Funny thing is, Doc, after I looked the crime scene over? I figured somebody had sneaked in and murdered Forrestal … and I was right: I did. I was the murderer who sneaked into Bethesda to kill Forrestal-I just didn’t know it. I didn’t know that that book I handed him was as lethal as poison gas.”
Bernstein said, flatly, “Forrestal threw himself out a window. Nothing changes that.”
“Yeah, I gave Jim Forrestal my thoughtful gift, that book of poetry, and I must’ve also passed along a posthypnotic suggestion to him-when was that, Doc, when I said, ‘I thought you’d find a book of poetry comforting,’ something like that? Anyway, thanks to the doc’s manipulation of my meager subconscious, I passed on the posthypnotic suggestion that made Forrestal get out of bed in the middle of the night, read that uplifting suicide poem you’d programmed him to read, Doc-and when Forrestal hit the crucial, guilt-inducing word-nightingale-he followed doctor’s orders and got some fresh air, trying to hang himself but succeeding instead in just throwing himself out the pantry window.”
Maria frowned, the big dark blue eyes tensed with curiosity. “Why ‘nightingale’?”
“Well,” I said, “in the original German, it’s Nachtigall, right, Doc? A guy named Teddy Kollek told me about it-you ought to get together with him, Doc, with your mutual interest in Palestine. Anyway, Operation Nightingale was a particularly ugly act of collaboration that Forrestal approved, subsidizing Ukrainian anti-Communist guerrillas who during the war were a Nazi execution squad, responsible for the mass slaughter of thousands of Jews. Not a bad guilt trigger for a man who felt he’d betrayed his country through such associations.”
He sat erect; chin up. “My name is Dr. Joseph Bernstein. As a Jew, I deeply resent these implications and accusations.”
“You know, Doc, as a guy who fought in the trenches on Guadalcanal, as a half-assed Jew myself, I find you just about the lowest-life piece of shit it’s ever been my misfortune to encounter. But what I really resent, Doc, what really annoys me, what really puts me in a bad place right now, is being used as your murder weapon. Jim Forrestal hired me to find out if somebody was trying to kill him; and, like everybody, I told him he was crazy. Then I wind up helping the guy who wanted him dead make that happen. Funny, huh? Ironic, even.”
I lifted my arm from the table and leveled the nine-millimeter at Bernstein’s head.
“Probably a tactical error on your part, Doc,” I said, “making a murderer out of me.”
Maria reached over and touched my shoulder, gently. “Nathan-don’t do it.”
“Don’t tell me I’ve convinced you that the doc, here, has been a bad boy….”
“Yes you have. I believe he’s been a very bad boy indeed. If you leave this to me, Nathan, I’ll handle it. The government will handle it, clean up their mistake-discreetly, but decisively.”
I shook my head. “Can’t do that, baby-but here’s what I will do. I’ll take the doc into custody right now- citizen’s arrest, if you will, of a war criminal.”
“All right,” she said guardedly. “But what then?”
“Then you and I, Maria, will hand his ass over to Chief Baughman of the Secret Service. I’ll tell Baughman my story and you’ll corroborate it. What do you say, baby?”
But she didn’t answer; she didn’t have a chance to.
Bernstein lurched across the table with a savage suddenness and in less than an instant his hands latched onto my fist, which clutched the nine-millimeter, swinging the gun’s muzzle away from himself, one of his hands tightening around the trigger and trigger guard and the gun went off, in Maria’s direction.
The bullet caught her in the forehead and I saw the terrible immediate emptiness in the dark blue eyes as the back of her head emptied in a horrible spray of red and gray and white, and I screamed in horror and reflexively loosened my grip on the gun, for a fraction of an instant, and then she had gone backward in the chair, sprawled onto the floor, vacant eyes staring up at the ceiling, red spreading in an awful pool on the linoleum, and the nine- millimeter wasn’t in my hand, anymore.
Bernstein was seated across me, and now the nine-millimeter was in his hand, and leveled at me…. Only he didn’t shoot.
“Sit down, Mr. Heller. Relax.”
Slowly, I sat back down.
“There are advantages to knowing the ways of the human mind,” he told me calmly. “If I had struggled with you for this weapon, I might be dead now. But by helping you squeeze the trigger on the lovely … late … Nurse Selff, I created the only circumstance that would cause you to loosen your grip on that gun, however momentarily.”
