“They were listening.”
“Well, sure,” he said. “That’s part of the deal; they monitor the calls. They’re involved in a very tricky operation, Sam, you just don’t know.”
“I want to know.”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that.” He bit his lips, drummed his fingers on the table, watched himself drum, then sighed and shook his head and showed me a face full of furrowed brow. “I can guarantee, Sam,” he said, “that you aren’t in any more danger. You talked to Doreen, right?”
“Right.”
“So you know I can make it stick. I’m not their prisoner, Sam, we’ve got an arrangement, a deal, and they need me.”
“How long?”
“All the way through to the finish. Which is gonna be in just about a week from now. And the thing is, I told them to lay off Doreen and they laid off. Am I right?”
“So far.”
“So now I told them to lay off you,” Ross told me, electric with sincerity. “And they will. I gave them the whole story, how I showed you the tape and you gave me advice and all, and how you wouldn’t go talk to the law because you’re my friend, and all the rest of it. They bought it, Sam, they honest to God did.”
“Tell me what’s going on,” I said.
“Aw, come on.” He fidgeted in his chair, rapping his knuckles now on the tabletop. “Don’t lean on me, Sam, okay? Accept it, they made a mistake going after you like that, and now they know it, and it won’t happen again. You want me to pay for the Volvo?”
I stared at him. “Pay for the Volvo? Ross, have you lost your marbles? You’re playing around with killers, and you want to stay with them.”
“It’s almost over.” Ross reached out and placed a trembling hand on my forearm. “Just wait for it, all right? Just trust me a little bit longer; I’ll tell you the whole story when it’s done.”
A horrible suspicion crossed my mind as I looked at his straining face, and I said, “Ross, for God’s sake. Do you see a project in this?”
His eyes slid away from mine. He said unconvincingly, “Who could think about work at a time like this?”
“You actually do,” I said. “What is it you see, a movie-of-the-week?”
That brought him back, with a sudden expression of scorn on his face. “Television? You think all I know is television?”
“Tell me what you know.”
He considered, his hand still vibrating on my forearm like an electric eel. “Okay,” he said, and lowered his voice. “Sam, this is big, this is very big. This is foreign governments, this is— What this is, it’s a book.”
“A book.”
“A nonfiction book, from the inside of the whole experience.” His eyes shone now with visions of sugarplums and glittering prizes, panic all but forgotten. “A mammoth best seller,” he said. “Sam, it can’t miss.”
“If you’re still around to write it.”
“Oh, I will be,” he said with total conviction. “I know how to deal with these clowns, Sam, I’m in that house like a lion tamer in the cage. It’s tricky as hell, you don’t have to tell me that, but I’m doing it.”
“What’s the story, Ross? What are they up to?”
He withdrew from me; hand off arm, face closing up, body moving back against the chair, fingers touching the chains on his chest. “Don’t ask me that, Sam,” he said.
I lifted my left hand from the piece of paper and rested it on the phone. “Somebody’s going to ask you,” I told him. “Either me, or a deputy sheriff named Ken Donaldson.”
He blinked, he blinked, he blinked. The chains clattered quietly in his fingers. The yellow windowless room in the fluorescent lighting seemed to grow steadily smaller. At last Ross sighed, and shook his head, and said, “I can tell you part, okay? Enough to get the idea. Okay?”
“Tell.”
“What this is,” he said, pausing to lick his lips, tap the table, play with his chains, glance toward the door, “this is a government, okay? Middle East, all right? There’s a person, there’s a very important person, you could call world-famous— Not an American, I promise you that, okay?”
“Tell,” I insisted.
“I’m telling, I am. This government, they want this person, for like a show trial, you know the kind of thing? So they can never get to him, there’s always this extreme security around him.”
“And you’ve invited him to dinner? Where do you connect with this, Ross?”
“He’s going to be in a place, this person,” Ross said. “There’s a specific place he’s going to be, a specific time, and from my property is absolutely the only way anybody could possibly get through the security. See, the land, you know, the land and then the other land.”
“Next door, or behind you, or something.”
“That’s right. So when the person is there, they can go in and grab him, come back out through my place, take off. From there they get him out of the country and however they do it, I’m done; it’s all over for me. They just need to be in my house a little while, setting up, getting everything ready for when they go in. And they need me to keep a normal front, you know? A regular appearance, so there’s nothing wrong on this land that’s right by the other land.”
“And in order to convince you to cooperate in a kidnapping,” I said, “they murdered three people.”
He blinked at me, at a loss. “What do you mean?”
“Delia, to begin with.”
“Yeah, yeah,” he said, impatiently brushing that aside, clearly not liking to be reminded. “They had to have a real good hook in me, didn’t they? And do you think I cry a lot over Delia?”
“They killed her. They didn’t know her, or dislike her, or have anything to do with her at all. They killed a human being just so they could get a handle on you. And you want to be their lion tamer.”
“I am their lion tamer! Jesus, Sam, I’ve been making it work, everything was fine, if you hadn’t called and started talking about tapes on the goddamn pho—” But then he stopped abruptly, and shook his head, expressing irritation at himself. “No, forget that. Now I’m acting as though it’s your fault. All right, these are very tough people, they’re from the army and the secret police, you know, in that country, and they aren’t exactly Boy Scouts.”
“They’re exactly murderers.”
“And kidnappers, don’t forget,” he said. “And I’ll tell you the truth, I haven’t yet seen one of them phone home to his mother. But I can handle them, Sam, and it’s just one more week, and I promise nobody’s gunning for you anymore.” He managed a shaky grin. “The fact is,” he said, “now they realize you’re not just some schmuck, you know? You’re not that easy to kill.”
“Thank you.”
“So they know you’re tough, and they have my guarantee you’ll keep quiet until they’re finished, and they need my cooperation, and they know if they took another shot at you and missed again, you’d have entire armies of cops swarming all over my place. So you’re out of it; absolutely, completely, and totally out of it.”
“Ross,” I said, “maybe you have enough for the book now.”
He stared at me. “What book? What have they done? A murder in the local papers, three days and it’s over. When these guys make their move, it’s going to be front page. Everywhere. Around the whole world they are going to make headlines, and those headlines are going to sell my book.”
I sat back, trying to understand and believe this idiot. “Ross,” I said, “you are a certifiable lunatic.”