The Third Bullet

that Irish gift of conviction, and when the sneak wouldn’t do, bullshit would. He could talk you out of your underpants and send you home happy. I suppose he was a complete psychopath, but he was our psychopath, and that was exactly what the proposition demanded.

I met him in the bar of the Willard, where he hung out every night when he wasn’t working.

“Jimmy, me boy,” I said in my phoniest movie brogue, a joke between us.

“I am,” he said, affecting his own version of a brogue, which he’d probably learned from Bing Crosby movies, “and how’s his eminence Mr. Meachum?” He always called me Mr. Meachum, as if I were of the castle and he of the cottage, and no amount of argument could convince him to do differently.

“Don’t know about his eminence,” I said, “but I’m fine.” It was an old line, but he pretended otherwise and laughed.

We exchanged banal chitchat for a few minutes, each consciously eyeing the room to see that no known adversaries happened to be there. When we were satisfied that we were publicly in private, we proceeded to business.

“Might you have a few days toward the end of the month for your old pal Meachum?”

“I might, though I am busy this time of year. Is there any flexibility?”

“Alas, no. My sales plan is cued to something I cannot control. It would require your presence in the city of Dallas, Texas – our expense, of course – from the nineteenth to the twenty-fifth. We’ll stay at the Adolphus–”

“A first-class joint.”

“Indeed, it is. I need a trusted fellow at my side while I deal with problems as they may come up. Someone smart, tough, fast. He’s not available, so I thought of you.”

He laughed. “They do keep James Bond busy these days, do they not?” James Bond was on everybody’s mind then.

“Never have trusted the Brits, Jimmy,” I said. “Wouldn’t take him if I could have him. Give me a son of the auld sod, with a twinkle in his eye and steel in his fists.”

He liked the compliment, even if we both seemed to be playing movie roles. “So, Dallas?” he said. “Not your usual sales area, Mr. Meachum.”

He was drinking Glenlivet on the rocks, myself Pinch and soda.

“Duty takes us where it takes us, Jimmy. I’d rather it were Paris myself. I do pay well, and if there’s hardship involved and some schedule shuffling, then I’ll pay for that; a kind of schedule-rearrangement bonus, as it were.”

“Well, Mr. Meachum, yours is my own favorite firm, and continuing in their favor is definitely in my interest, so aside from travel expenses, I’ll not charge more, and I will see you where you want me in Dallas at any time on the nineteenth.”

Simple as that, I got Jimmy, and as with Lon’s genius and talent for rifles, what happened could not have happened without his contribution. He was always a rogue and hero, the bravest of the brave, the truest of the true. You see, we weren’t monsters. I suppose that’s the lesson. You’ve been taught that if we existed, we were the vilest of the vile, snatching greatness from the young prince and sending our nation on its way to hell. But to us, we were professionals, patriots, and men of honor. We weren’t in it for the money, or to sell more Bell helicopters and McDonnell-Douglas fighter jets, but to save lives and lead the nation through the swamp to the hilltop. Besides, we were only going to kill a screwball right-wing general.

CHAPTER 16

As I said, Sergeant,” said Harry Gardner, “Dad was a man of literature, really. So his books, his private books, were all fiction.”

Swagger once again stood at the threshold of Niles Gardner’s office, that book-lined cave where the CIA’s famous Boswell had tried for thirty years to write novels and failed. He could see the Red Nine lying undisturbed on the desk and the four ceramic bluebirds and the illustration of the six green elm trees on the shelves.

“Well,” said Swagger, “as I say, it’s a long shot. But I noted that beside the pistol, which is sometimes called a Red Nine, there’s that collection of bluebirds, four of ’em, and that picture of elm trees, six of ’em. It occurred to me that somehow the phrases ‘Red Nine,’ ‘Blue Four,’ or ‘Green Six’ might have had some meaning to him, like in some private way he was commemorating them.”

“Wow,” said Harry, “you know, that’s remarkable. I noted those things too, and I thought them strange, but it never occurred to me to put them in a pattern. They were so unlike Dad. He was not a sentimentalist, and those bluebirds in particular are so kitsch that I can’t understand why they’re there. Let’s look at the picture.” He took it down from the wall, handed it to Swagger, then took it back. “Dime-store frame. Let’s see what the picture is.”

He turned it over, unfolded four soft copper flaps securing the mounting board, and shook the board free of the frame. The picture fluttered to the floor. Bob picked it up and discovered that it was folded in such a way to display the six trees, but it was actually an illustration from a Redbook short story entitled “Passion’s Golden Tresses.” Unfolded, it showed a handsome young man chastely embracing a beautiful young blonde against a forest backdrop. The subtitle on the story was “Her Hair Was Beautiful, But Was That All David Loved?” The author was Agnes Stanton Phillips.

“Good Lord,” said Harry. “Now, there’s your classic fifties kitsch!” He turned to Swagger. “You’ve introduced a strangeness to my father that not even I knew existed! What on earth does this mean?”

“It connects with nothing of your father, or his mind, or anything that you can think of?”

“Nothing. I’m astonished. Where’s this going?”

“I found the pistol odd too, in its way. I noted those other things, all with the numbers attached to colors. I thought: Radio call signs, agent names, map coordinates, some kind of color code, all of which could have some connection to intelligence work and might have some bearing somehow on the fake name he cooked up for Hugh Meachum.”

“In other words, if you can decipher the pattern, maybe it’s the same pattern that connects to Hugh. Or the same principle of pattern, is that it?”

“Something like that. I know it’s thin, believe me.”

“Thin or not, it’s fascinating but way beyond me, Sergeant.”

“It could also be nothing. He liked bluebirds. He liked trees. He liked Mausers.”

“But he didn’t like trees. He didn’t like Mausers. He most certainly didn’t like bluebirds, that I can guarantee you, particularly ceramic ones. So maybe you are on to something.”

“If so, I ain’t smart enough to figure it out.”

“I’ll tell you what. You feel free to dig around here. As I say, I’ve been over it all, and I can guarantee you: no porn, no hidden notes from mistresses, no decoded instructions from his secret masters in the Kremlin, no movie scripts, nothing that anyone but a son would find interesting, and even his son didn’t find it that interesting. I am going to leave you alone with Niles Gardner, and if you find anything, more power to you. Do you need coffee, beer, bourbon, wine, a sandwich, anything like that?”

“No sir.”

“The bathroom is down the hall. Feel free to use it.”

“Thank you, Mr. Gardner.”

Bob turned and faced the mind, or at least a portion of it, of Niles Gardner. He found it intimidating. It was all books, and most of them Bob had never heard of. But starting at the top left-hand corner of the top left-hand bookshelf – the book was A Death in the Family by James Agee – he began to methodically pull each one out, flip the pages for inserts, bookmarks, underlines, whatever, and work his way through the shelves, going from the As to, finally, the Zs.

It took over three hours, and from the well-thumbed, well-worn condition of the volumes, Swagger could tell that Niles Gardner was a man who loved his novels. Hemingway, Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Orwell, Dickens, Wolfe, Wells, Bellow, Friedman, Golding, Brautigan, Pynchon, Fitzgerald, Crane, Flaubert, Camus, Proust, Wharton, Spillane, Tolkien, Robbins, Wallant, he read passionately and catholically. A classic in a Modern Library edition was