“One night, sleeping in an alley, I got the toe of a boot in my ribs. Someone spoke to me in the lilt. A soldier was standing over me. You can believe he got an earful of Irish like he’d never had!
“Then it was home for me, back to Dublin. I was put in a Jesuit seminary, if you’d believe it. I guess it was my choice. I’d seen hell, you see.
“I learned another logic, got my health back. By the age of twenty I was tired of truth. Can you understand that?”
“Of course.”
“The celibacy had worn thin, too. So I wrote friend of mine, Master William Cavanaugh, in London. I sent the letter direct this time. Asking for a job. I gather the letter caused a great laugh, among the old boys.
“The rest of my life is a blank.”
“I know you didn’t work in Chicago.”
“I know you know that. You did work in Chicago. What were you doing at the newspaper the other if you weren’t enquiring about me?”
“You became a spy again.”
“Did I say that?”
“But you married, and had kids.”
“I did that. An unusual thing for a lad who thought he’d be a priest to do.”
“Odd for a spy, too.”
“I wouldn’t say that, precisely.”
“Are you Catholic now?”
“Are the Catholics Catholic now, I’d want to know. My kids enjoy something or other, but what it is, I don’t know. They disappear on the Sundays with their guitars and violins and bang around in some church, shaking hands and kissing each other. They tell me it’s very exhilarating.”
“Your wife is Irish? American? What?”
“She’s from Palestine, a Jewish girl. I had a job of work to do out there in that area at one time. Would you believe we had to go to Fada to be married when she was pregnant? Neutral territory.”
“Flynn, your being a Boston policeman is a cover. It’s your cover.”
“Why don’t you pour yourself some fresh whiskey, lad?”
“That’s why you’ve said you have no experience as a policeman. You’ve never actually been a policeman.”
“I have to bumble along,” said Flynn. “Bumble along.”
“You became a Boston policeman just at the time the intelligence agencies were being investigated by Congress and everyone else throughout the world.”
“Have I said too much?” Flynn’s face was a study in innocence. “It must be the tea talking.”
“Can you still speak German?”
“In a way, it’s my natural tongue.”
“As a member of the Hitler Youth, did you ever actually have to pick up a gun and use it?‘
“I did, yes.”
“What happened?”
“In my confusion, I almost shot myself. I couldn’t shoot at the Allied troops advancing on Munich. I couldn’t shoot the lads I had been brought up with.”
“What did you do?”
“I cried. I lay down in a ditch of mud and I cried. I wasn’t fifteen yet, lad. I doubt I’d do anything different today.”
A heavy gust blew a sheet of rain against the windows.
“Now it’s your turn, Fletch.”
Twenty-four
Fletch mixed himself a second drink.
He said, “I doubt I have anything to say.”
Even through the thick walls of the building they could hear the wind.
“I’ve done this much on you,” said Flynn, from his chair. “Born and raised in Seattle. You have Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees from Northwestern. You didn’t complete your Ph.D.”
“The money ran out.”
Fletch sat down again in his chair.
“You concentrated in journalism and fine arts. You wrote on the arts for a newspaper in Seattle. Broke a story there regarding the illicit importing of pre-Columbian Canadian objects. You joined the Marine Corps, were sent to the Far East, and won the Bronze Star, which you have never accepted. You then worked as an investigative reporter for the
“There’s a difference?”
“About eighteen months ago, you disappeared from southern California.”
“It’s hard to get full cooperation from a newspaper these days,” said Fletch “One doesn’t get to be a newspaper executive without political savvy—which is utterly destructive to the newspaper.”
. “You’ve been married and divorced,twice, and there has been a continuous flap in the courts about your refusal to pay alimony. Charges against you, from fraud to contempt—all, I suspect, incurred in your line of duty were all dropped. Incidentally, after enquiring about you through several California police agencies, I received a personal phone call from the district attorney, or assistant district attorney, somewhere out there, a Mister Chambers, I think he said his name was, giving you high marks for past cooperation in one or two criminal cases.”
“Alston Chambers. We were in the Marines together.”
“Where have you been the last eighteen months?”
“Traveling. I was in Brazil for a while. The British West Indies. London. I’ve been living in Italy.”
“You returned to this country once, to Seattle, for your father’s funeral. Did you say you inherited your money from him?”
“No. I didn’t say that.”
“He was a compulsive gambler,” Flynn said.
Fletch said, “I know.”
“You didn’t answer the question as to where your money came from.”
“An old uncle,” Fletch lied. “Died while I was in California.”
“I see ” Flynn accepted the lie as a lie.
“He couldn’t leave his money to my father, could he?”
“So there are a good many people in your past who’d like to do you harm,” Flynn said. “That’s the trouble with crime in a mobile society. People wander all over the face of the earth, dragging their pasts with them. A good investigation these days is almost completely beyond a local police department, no matter how good.”
“Your tea must be getting cold,” Fletch said.
“Just as good cold as hot” Flynn poured himself some more. “We Europeans aren’t as sensitive to temperature as you Americans are.”
Fletch said, “You’re thinking my past may have caught up with me in some way. Someone has followed me here and purposely put me in this pickle.”
“Well, I’d hate to have to fill up the other side of the page that contains the list of your enemies. Isn’t it said that a good journalist has no friends?”
“I think you’re wrong, Inspector. As Peter Fletcher I was the victim of an accidental frame-up. Someone committed murder in this apartment and arranged things to hang the blame on the next person through the front door.”
“Take this Rome situation, for example,” said Flynn. “Can you explain it to me?”
“What do you mean?”
