Trail of the Twisted Cros Page 8

  “Least, that’s what it sounded like to me when he ran off at the mouth about it couple nights before it all came down. The explosion, I mean.”

  Slayton nodded.

  “Did he say anything specific about the plans, about the request for his special services?” Slayton asked.

  “No, it was just the way he acted. He got real drunk, and he was pissin and moanin about gettin in too deep maybe with all this Rogers crowd and… yeah, I remember one thing, but it prob’ly don’t mean nothin.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “He kept on fussin about his goddam Thermos, that it had to be set to go for him and not to let him forget. We had a fight about it. I wondered why the goddam Sam Hill he was so goddam worked up about this goddam Thermos for all of a sudden, and he belts me across the mouth and—”

  “Mrs. Hays,” Slayton interrupted, “let me just ask you something very important now. Did he come back home with that Thermos?”

  She thought for several long moments.

  “I don’t honestly recall whether he did or didn’t. Don’t think so. Don’t care much, either.”

  NASSAU, The Bahamas

  “This is the worst part of the job,” he complained to the young lieutenant sitting opposite him, filling him in on the detail at the Emerald.

  “I can imagine.”

  “You have the number?” he asked, the telephone receiver pressed to his ear.

  The lieutenant spread the appropriate page of his report open for the police chief.

  The chief dialed direct, waited for the clicks to fall into place, and then heard the sound of a woman’s voice.

  “Mrs. Colin Hays?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m truly sorry to have to tell you this, but it’s about your husband. I am chief of police in Nassau, the Bahamas. My name is Delroy. Your husband…”

  Chapter Nine

  DANBURY, Connecticut, 11 September

  “Technically speaking,” the warden was saying to Slayton, “he’s not supposed to have any visitors. That’s not his decision or mine, you understand. It’s, in fact, an order from your own Treasury Department.”

  “You have that order countermanded by my superior, Hamilton Winship. What more do you want? Someone made the decision for you, now let’s see if you can make a decision to follow someone else’s decision.”

  “Mr. Slayton, you are a contemptuous man, you—”

  “Save it. Right now, I am an impatient man. We have here a matter of national emergency, and you’re picking nits. Now get me in there to see this half-baked Schickelgruber. You have your orders.”

  Red-faced, the warden rose from his chair and summoned a pair of guards.

  “Take this man into seclusion, let him talk to Rogers for”—the warden consulted his wrist watch—“fifteen minutes, and then march him the hell off this penitentiary.”

  Slayton was taken to Rogers’ room immediately. Rogers, who seemed to know everything that happened at the penitentiary before it happened, was expectant.

  “Benjamin Justin Slayton, correct?” he asked.

  “True enough. I have some questions for you, Rogers.”

  Rogers sat back down in the chair at his desk. He had been writing in a tablet.

  “The new Mein Kamf there, as long as you’re in prison?” Slayton asked.

  Rogers smiled.

  “The world already has one,” he said. “I couldn’t have said it any better myself.”

  “What’s your game, Rogers?”

  “My game?”

  “Is there an echo in here?”

  “I do not play games, Mr. Slayton. My business is leading a political movement. My movement claims all white Christians. We are for the strengthening of American institutions.”

  “Tall order.”

  “I have just told you the same goals claimed by, say, the Republican Party.”

  Slayton blinked, incredulously.

  “How many times have you read in the newspapers about how the Republican Party is writing off the black vote? How many times have you read about the Republican Party writing off the Jewish vote?” Rogers grinned widely, warming to his task.

  “And every time you read that, do you see the newspapers calling Republicans a bunch of dirty Nazis?”

  “Look—”

  “No, you don’t. We say the same things, and somehow we’re extremists. Racists. Well, call us what you will.”

  “I’m not here to listen to your political drivel, mac.”

  “You asked about my game.”

  “I want to know how in the world you think you can get away with the deaths of all those men down at the Loveridge mine, how you can read about the destruction of an entire city and sit here laughing. God, man, you’re in here for murder already—”

  “Oh, not for long, sir, I assure you.”

  “So you expect your goons to spring you? You expect you’ll be released with a million bucks worth of gold to Algeria? What do you think you’re dealing with here?”

  “Stranger things have happened. The Shah said jump, and we jumped, for all those years. The Ayatollah now.”

  “That ended, as you may recall from the newspapers.”

  “It ended for a time. We have a new President in office now, and we will test his mettle. They all come in strong, and they leave weakened. That’s because we have a basically weak system.”

  “Is that what your brown-shirted friends are doing?”

  “I have many friends. Some of my friends wear uniforms; others, like me, wear suits and ties. You might be surprised to know some of my friends who wear suits and ties.”

  “You’re called the Führer.”

  “Yes.”

  “Any particular reason?”

  “People call me what they will. I have no control over such a thing.”

  “How do you live?”

  “People give me things.”

  “What do you call yourself?”

  “A visionary, a patriot, an American, a soldier in the great battle for the survival of the fittest.”

  “You’re a scumbag, Rogers, that’s what you are.”

  Rogers stood up again, stalked toward Slayton, and knew at once that he spoke to a sworn enemy.

  “There will come a day, and soon, when you will regret those words, Mr. Slayton.”

  “Spoken like a true fascist. I seem to remember Eva Peron having the same sentiments when she was faced up to by people who knew that a pig is a pig is a pig.”

  Slayton had the information he was looking for, though he knew Rogers was unaware he had given it. He stood up, preparing to leave.

  “Stinks in here,” Slayton said. “I’m going to leave the source of the odor.”

  He went to the door of the room to call for a guard to come release him. Rogers followed him, raised an arm, and brought a steel-shanked sap down over Slayton’s head. Only a corner of Slayton’s forehead was hit, however, with the biggest part of the blow catching him in the shoulder.

  Slayton pitched down to the floor, dizzied by the suddenness of the assault. He didn’t rise to a defense, expecting that the guards would burst into the room any instant.

  But they didn’t. And Rogers stood over him, his mouth twisted into an evil grin, ready to bring down the sap again. Slayton jerked his body out of the path of the weapon, angered more by the slowness of the guards than by Rogers’ attack.

  With enough time out of range of Rogers’ stick, Slayton cleared his head. He leaped to his feet and took a jujitsu stance. In a single blinding strike, Slayton disarmed Rogers by striking the Nazi’s forearm sharply with the edge of his hard hand.

  Still, the guards were nowhere.

  Angered to the point of frenzy now, Slayton moved in on the hapless Rogers, stunned by his would-be victim’s ability to fend for himself in hand-to-hand combat. Slayton kicked him sharply in the shins and hips, sending Rogers sprawling to the floor of his room.

  Then Slayton picked him up by locking his fingers arou
nd the tender part of Rogers’ collarbone. He threw him across the room, slamming Rogers into a wall.

  As Rogers slid into a heap in one corner, Slayton called out again to the guards.

  This time, they shuffled toward the door, opened it, and expressed surprise at what had occurred inside.

  “You let this happen,” Slayton said. He was breathing hard, but not from the exertion. He was angered. “You don’t know who you’re dealing with, you dumb screws. You’ll be eating your balls for breakfast.”

  As he left Danbury, Slayton knew he was the loser. All he had accomplished was to beat a man, humiliate the type of men who could be his followers in some new order, and raise his own blood pressure.

  NEW YORK CITY

  As he rode by taxicab from LaGuardia Airport, Slayton tried to figure some central thread to the events thus far: the assassination threat to Richard Nixon, the demand for the release of the jailed Johnny Lee Rogers, and the Love-ridge explosion.

  The only answer he had thus far was that somewhere, deep down in the events of the last few days, someone was running a charade.

  “Tunnel all right?” the taxi driver asked, disturbing Slayton’s thoughts.

  “Fine, take it.”

  He tried to turn off his mind for a while. His head hurt. He read advertising on billboards as his taxi left Queens and dipped into the midtown tunnel. He settled back into the seat, wondering if by some stroke of luck he would have some brilliant flash of resolution by the time he reached the light at the end of the tunnel.

  He had no such luck.

  “What’s your address again?” the driver asked. They were at a light at First Avenue, and the driver was scrawling something into a log book.

  Slayton gave him the Nixon address. The driver whistled.

  “Inconclusive,” the man in charge of the mobile forensic unit kept saying over and over to Slayton. Inconclusive testing for paper samples, ink samples, fingerprints. The works. Not a single lead.

  Slayton then insisted on going over all the samples collected, and analyzed them himself. He, too, found nothing of note. A telephone rang somewhere, and as one of the regular Secret Service agents answered it, Slayton was reminded of the call to the Associated Press office in New York. Remind me to speak to Winship about media attention now, he told himself.

  The telephone, it turned out, was for him.

  “Ben, there’s a homicide, being handled by city police.” The voice was Winship’s.

  “Are you here in town?”

  “Yes. The St. Regis. I’ll want to see you there in about two hours. Look for me in the lobby. Meanwhile, let me give you some particulars.”

  Winship gave Slayton the name of the investigating officer in charge, and the location, not too far from the Nixon house. Slayton hung up, said nothing to the others, and left The Residence for the corner of York Avenue and East 66th Street, a district of Manhattan popular with airline personnel because of its proximity to the East Side Airline Terminal bus transport to and from New York’s LaGuardia and Kennedy Airports. “The Stewardess Gulag,” as it was sometimes known.

  Behind a railroad tenement building, Slayton found a group of New York City detectives gathered around a body. The body was wrapped in a large oilcloth and had been dumped in the small garden area adjacent to someone’s apartment. That someone, Slayton was informed, was a stewardess who discovered the dead man, and was now being treated for shock at Bellevue Hospital.

  “Who is it?” Slayton asked, after showing a startled chief investigating officer his Department identification.

  “Oh, I suppose since he’s a mailman that you’re interested? Federal boy and all?” the officer asked. He was trying to be helpful.

  A mailman!

  Slayton knelt over the body. An average-looking man. Nothing distinguishing about him. Neck had been snapped—expertly, Slayton guessed.

  Slayton entered a few particulars in his own notebook. The mailman’s name, approximate time of death, and so on—but his was not the job to pick over dead bones.

  He thanked the New York police, and stepped outside the garden around the tenement building, on the way to the street. And there he saw it. It was pure luck. Or was it? If he hadn’t been down to the Lovebridge mine to investigate personally that end of this matter, he never would have recognized the piece of square brass.

  He leaned over and picked it up. Stamped into the metal were the words “St. John’s Colliery” and the number 290.

  “We have no strategy,” Winship said. “These bastards know what they’re doing. We cannot allow another Lovebridge, can we?”

  “No, of course not,” Slayton said. “But we’ve got, what… five or six days before the deadline, when we have to go along and release that scumbag?”

  Slayton fingered the tag from St. John’s Colliery, which he had popped into his coat pocket.

  “I think it would be easy enough for you to let word filter back to Rogers that the government plans to go along with the demands?”

  “Easy enough, sure,” Winship said. “What do you have in mind?”

  “Also, you’ll want to arrange for a nationwide alert at mines. No Thermos bottles or like objects are to be permitted down in the pits. That’s how the Lovebridge was blown, by the way. A remote-controlled or time device activated a cordite bomb.”

  “Used by the British in the war,” Winship mused.

  “The big one?”

  “The very one.”

  “How nice. Cordite was used a lot in ‘Nam. Great to know how bombs can span the generations.”

  “Anything else?” Winship asked, a bit miffed at being told to make lists by his subordinate.

  “The media?”

  “Oh yes. How did they know, and all that. And how did the FBI know. Well, it seems that the AP here received an anonymous call, from a man with a British accent… not English, not Scotch, either…

  “Anyway, the AP put the thing on the wire as an advisory, and now it’s a full-fledged story. The FBI was contacted by your man down at Fairmont, the mining executive, and that’s the connection there.”

  “So fairly soon, I expect the threat on Nixon will be known?”

  “It won’t be long.”

  “I’ll see if I can’t make it back before then.”

  “Where are you—”

  Slayton was halfway across the St. Regis lobby, leaving Winship sputtering, but assuming, correctly, his destination. Godspeed, he thought.

  Chapter Ten

  CARDIFF, Wales, United Kingdom,

  12 September

  Like most first-time visitors to Wales, Slayton was first struck by the huge wall of differences that seemed to close over this western section of the British Isles. Yet he knew that Wales was fundamentally British, far more British than England.

  It was in the mountain fastness and the sequestered valleys of Wales that the original Britons had managed to preserve their way of life, whereas other more vulnerable parts of Britain had been successively overrun by invaders.

  The people looked different, to begin with, Slayton decided. The Welsh were able to trace their origins back 2,400 years, to before the Roman occupation, to a short, dark Iberian people.

  An amazing thing, he thought. So small a country, next to another small country, and yet there were such huge differences in the mere appearances of people. The English were tall and finely featured; the Welsh, short and broadly built. Slayton was accustomed, as are most Americans, to nearly every community and every region of America having the same basic ethnic mix, a fairly even distribution. But in Britain, this was not the case.

  In fact, he realized, that was exactly what Britain—at least some Britons nowadays—had always fought. Slayton sat bolt upright in his train seat.

  Could this be the charade?

  He scribbled a note to himself and tucked it away.

  The South Wales Labour Exchange is located along Cardiff’s Severn waterfront in a long, low red-brick building designed so that the view of the po
rt by residents of the hill district is unobstructed.

  A man of thirty-five years or so walked casually into the exchange, approached the hiring window, and produced his British working documents, including a mine worker’s union card.

  “ ’Eard about work out the Rhondda way. Is it true, mate?”

  The clerk at the window slid the man’s papers toward him.

  “Before I look, let me take a wee guess. Manchester?” the clerk asked.

  “You got it right, mafe. First time, too. Nice job of it.”

  “Never miss, me,” the clerk said. “Come across you Manchester lads right regular now, I do. What with the redundancies and all that sort of rot, what?”

  “I say you can stick old Maggie into the North Sea is what!”

  “Only way Her Nibbs is going to know the meanin’ of the word uncomfortable is the way I see it.”

  The job applicant was growing impatient with the small chat.

  “Is it true?”

  “What. Is what true?”

  “The work, out Rhondda?”

  The clerk frowned and shuffled the papers in front of him a bit more.

  “There’s one colliery open and hiring now, but jobs go first to those what live there. Cannot be any guarantees I’m givin’ you.”

  “Oh, but I love the land out there.”

  The clerk frowned again.

  “Some don’t, not at all. Those that live up over the valley look down at mid-afternoon and they see nothing but dark, the houses all lit up like it’s the middle of the night because the sun won’t get to their level.”

  “It’s the spirit of the place I’m discussin’, though.”

  “Aye. And there’s that singer from Rhondda…”

  “Jones, Tom.”

  “And the writer?”

  “Follett, Ken. An American now, I hear.”

  “Now that’s the way to have it, what?”

  “I’ve always fancied myself an American some day,” the job applicant said. “Some day, maybe.”

  The clerk finished stamping his papers, wrote down the name of the foreman at the St. John’s Colliery, and shoved the material back across the desk.

  “There you be now, off to the Rhondda. Do you have lodgings?”