“Sure,” said the Pro. “What’re you getting at?”
“I was just wondering if they found what they were really after. I mean, you haven’t actually seen the papers for a couple of years. Maybe they’re not in that wall anymore.”
The Pro shrugged it off, but he was clearly disturbed. I had to make him wonder if the papers were gone, if he had already lost his treasure without even knowing it. I had to play on his paranoia until he could no longer live with the doubt, until he just had to go into that wall and get those papers back out.
Several times over the next few hours he asked me if I really thought they might be gone. “Who knows?” I replied. “It would sure explain an awful lot.”
It was late into the evening of the second day when the Pro suddenly said, “Okay, I’m gonna get them out. I’ll show them to you.”
Just like that. It was hard to believe. It had been much too easy. I began to wonder if he really had the Hughes papers, if this was all a scam, if I had been playing him or if he had been playing me, if I had followed another false trail. Or, even if he really did have them, if he was simply trying to keep me from unmasking him by making a promise he never intended to keep.
I didn’t yet understand how desperately he wanted to get rid of the curse. I never really would. Not until I had the papers myself.
I returned from that trip to write my story about the break-in, uncertain now if I had actually solved it. Several times over the next few months I talked to the Pro, pay phone to pay phone, and each time he said he would show me the papers. But not quite yet.
Finally, I went ahead with the magazine article, presenting the case as unsolved, raising questions about who was behind it, never mentioning the Pro, not quite sure how he really fit into it all, also not wanting to put an X on the treasure map.
But there was a hidden message in that story, one that made clear I knew far more, and to make sure that the Pro didn’t miss it, I delivered a copy of the magazine to him personally.
He read the story all the way through, turned back to an illustration up front, a picture of a safecracker opening a Pandora’s box, a vault spewing out all manner of strange and terrible secrets, and, pointing to the burglar, he said, “Hey, that’s me.”
That’s what got him. Not my story. Not my hidden message. That picture. It had memorialized the break-in, had finally given him some recognition, had made his adventure seem meaningful again. He kept looking at that picture all day.
The next day we went hunting together.
He was testing me, seeing whether I would go out into the woods alone with him, a shotgun in his hand, whether I would risk that after threatening to nail him, and as we walked through the trees toward a river he asked me if I had told anyone what I knew. I said I had not.
“Don’t you think it’s pretty dangerous to tell me that?” he asked.
“Not really,” I replied. “Who else are you going to find to take those damn papers off your hands?”
I had never gone hunting before, had never shot anything but a tin can, but I was lucky now and shot down a duck, and while the recoil nearly broke both my jaw and my shoulder, I knew I had passed some important rite, had successfully entered his territory.
As we were walking, we talked politics, and the Pro told me he had received a letter from Richard Nixon thanking him for his support of the president’s Vietnam policy. It was dated June 5, 1974.
We got to talking about Watergate. “Square Johns,” said the Pro. He said it with real contempt. “You don’t get a bunch of retired spies and FBI agents to do a break-in,” he added. “If you want to do a break-in, you get yourself some burglars.”
And all the while I kept wondering if this Nixon supporter, this Hughes admirer, this oddly vulnerable professional thief with right-wing ideas and left-wing instincts was really going to give me his stolen secret papers.
While we were sitting by the river, he told me he would. And this time I knew that he meant it.
I told him that I also had to know the full story of the break-in, that I would protect him, keep his name out of it, go to jail myself if necessary rather than give him up, but that I had to know who was really behind the heist.
“I don’t know,” said the Pro.
He told me how it all came down, about the Jiggler and Red and Mr. Inside, and about the mystery man who suddenly appeared the night of the break-in. He told me details only one of the burglars could know, but there was one detail he could not tell me: who was ultimately behind it.
“I never knew,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to end up with the papers. I always figured that whoever was behind it would come after me. No one ever did.
“Except you.”
My instructions were to go directly from the airport to a massage parlor. That’s what the Pro told me a few weeks later, when he called to say he was ready to show me the papers.
“Just ask for Honey,” he said. “She’ll take good care of you.”
The parlor was on the outskirts of town, along a seedy commercial strip, and inside it was decorated with oil paintings of nude women, all painted with real passion by a convict whose fantasies had clearly run wild while he was locked up in prison. The artist was a friend of the Pro’s, and the Pro owned a piece of the parlor.
I asked for Honey. She smiled invitingly and took me through a beaded curtain to a back room. “Aren’t you going to take off your clothes?” she asked. I hesitated, wondering first if she had mistaken me for a regular customer, then wondering if this was the punch line of a practical joke, if the Pro had lured me into coming for his papers only to leave me naked in his whorehouse. On the other hand, this could be merely a prudent security measure. What better way to make sure I wasn’t wired or armed?
I stripped down to my shorts. “Don’t be shy,” said Honey, and I took them off too. She checked me out, went through my clothes, and when I was dressed again she led me out a back door. We got into a car parked behind the parlor and drove to a garden apartment a few miles away. It was empty, and without explanation Honey drove off, leaving me there alone.
At first I just sat anxiously on the edge of an armchair, waiting to see who would appear, what would happen next. I waited ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour. Nothing happened. A clock in the kitchen showed a different hour than my watch, so I picked up the phone to call for the right time. The line was dead.
Tired and tense, I stretched out on a couch, but as soon as I lay down I felt something hard sticking into my back. Reaching between the cushions, searching for the source of my discomfort, I pulled out a gun. A black nine-millimeter Browning semiautomatic. It was loaded.
Hurriedly, I stuffed the pistol back between the cushions, sat upright at the other end of the couch, then realized that my fingerprints were all over that gun. Alarmed by the thought, I wiped the gun clean with my shirttail and again shoved it back where I had found it, all my senses now on full alert.
At that instant, I heard the door open. In walked the Pro. He had been parked out front all along, waiting to see if I had been tailed. He said he was going to take me to see the papers.
We drove quite a distance, and while I wasn’t familiar with the area, it seemed that he doubled back several times, always with an eye on the rearview mirror. Finally, we made a few quick turns, drove through a shopping center, and pulled into a motel. The room was empty. No secret papers. We stayed there an hour or so, watching TV, then left.
“You didn’t really think I was going to give them to you, did you?” asked the Pro as we got back into his car. I just looked at him, full of anger. He laughed.