She rolled her eyes. “Right.”
“So did you get hold of your home office?” I asked.
“I did. They have no idea what you’re talking about. Berkowitz never mentioned anything about a breakthrough in his dispatch. Nor did he mention any inside source.”
“That’s damned curious. I mean, he went off like a whirling dervish the last time we spoke. I can’t believe he wasn’t gonna write about it.”
“I also did some checking on Jack Tretorne. Our reporter who covers the Agency knows him. He’s in charge of the Balkans. He’s even got a nickname. Jack of Serbia.”
“No kidding,” I said.
“Nope, no kidding,” she deadpanned. “Like Lawrence of Arabia. He’s been working Serbian affairs since 1990 when Yugoslavia first exploded. He’s got a great reputation, very smart, very capable. They say he’s the behind-the-scenes mastermind on nearly everything.”
“Makes you wonder why he’s here, huh?” I asked, giving her a sly, confidential wink.
She was still looking at me strangely, and I was starting to feel like Mel Gibson must’ve felt in that conspiracy movie.
She said, “Why wouldn’t he be here? There’s a war raging just across the border. Maybe if he was hanging around in Nicaragua, I might wonder. In fact, if he wasn’t here, I might wonder.”
I got this sense she was losing patience with me. I said, “So you’re telling me nobody heard Berkowitz mention anything interesting about this investigation?”
“No. But then the Kosovo massacre wasn’t really the main attraction that brought him here.”
That surprised me, until I thought about it. Then it made perfect sense. Of course. What Berkowitz was really interested in was the conspiracy between the CIA and the Special Forces. Breaking my massacre story might get him some acclaim, but exposing a modern replay of Operation Phoenix-hell, that would get him a seat in the Pulitzer hall of fame. Maybe he’d write a book about it, and they’d make a movie about him, like what happened with Woodward and Bernstein over Watergate. Who would they get to play Berkowitz, though? Dom DeLuise?
Only there was one very vexing problem with this scenario: His own newspaper didn’t know anything about it.
At that moment Warner said, “Look, Sergeant Stupnagel, I have to admit that I’m having a little trouble taking you seriously.”
I said, “No, you look, Miss Wiener-”
“Warner,” she sharply corrected.
“Right, and like I’ve told you four times, my name’s Hufnagel. Harry Hufnagel.”
She gave me the kind of look usually reserved for used-car salesmen. Black eyes, by the way, can be very penetrating. She said, “Well, that’s part of our problem here. I had the information office run down your name. There’s only one Hufnagel in all of Tuzla. She’s a legal specialist on temporary duty.”
“A rose is a rose by any other name,” I said.
“You’re no rose. Who are you?”
My first impulse was to lie again. Make up some name like Godfrey Gommeners: I mean, I was getting tired of Harold Hufnagel anyway. But why not tell her who I really was? All the jigs were up at this point anyway, and it wasn’t like I could get in any deeper trouble than I was already in.
“Okay, I’m Major Sean Drummond. I’m the chief investigating officer for the Kosovo massacre.”
She looked at me curiously, like I’d suddenly gravitated to a whole new plane. “Can you prove that?”
“If you insist. I actually have this military ID card they issued me, but it’s back in my tent. I could always take you back to my office, but then I’d get in trouble, because I’m not authorized to deal with the press.”
“Then why this masquerade?”
“Because I believe Berkowitz’s murder was somehow connected to my investigation.”
“And you wanted me to fill in some blanks for you?”
“Actually, yes. That’s exactly what I wanted.”
“But you didn’t want me to get a hook into you? Was that it?”
I acted embarrassed, which wasn’t too difficult, because I was. I said, “Look, Berkowitz did a hatchet job on me on the front page of your paper. He also tried to blackmail me. Under the circumstances…”
She seemed very disappointed in me. Those scimitar-like eyebrows sliced downward in a deeply disapproving frown. “And you have no solid information about Berkowitz’s murder? Do you?”
“I can tell you he was murdered by a pro. I can tell you it had something to do with the story he was covering. And I’ll repeat again, I believe it was connected to my investigation.”
I decided not to mention that I was also being framed for his death. Or that my office was tapped and that the conversation Berkowitz and I had there might’ve been the trigger to his murder. After all, I needed her to trust me, and I already seemed to be having a bit of trouble in that department.
She said, “And that’s it?”
I said, “Well, what do you think got him murdered?”
She seemed ambivalent for a few seconds, and I hoped her mental coin toss landed in my direction. I gave her my most endearing expression, which, like my look of fiery conviction, tends to get mixed results.
Finally she said, “Major Drummond, I don’t know what you’re up to, but I’m still having a little trouble trusting you.”
I said, “Story of my life. Every pretty girl I ever met says that.”
She chuckled a bit, and that took some of the edge off.
“Look, Janice,” I said with as much conviction as I could muster, “we’re headed in the same direction. I’m an Army officer. I don’t like the idea that someone who wears my same uniform slipped a garrote around a reporter’s neck. I’m also an officer of the court. Call me old-fashioned, but I believe crime should pay.”
She said, “All right, all right. I just don’t think I can help you. If we had any idea what got Berkowitz murdered, you’d be reading about it on the front page of the Herald. He was covering your investigation. And he was doing the occasional routine piece on the operation in Kosovo. We just don’t see any angles there that got him killed.”
“Was there anything else?” I asked.
“Well, he was also running some silly investigation on neoNazis and white supremacists in the Army. It was a personal passion of his. A crazy thing he’d been working on for years. Berkowitz was Jewish, you know. His grandparents actually died in the Nazi death camps.”
Only with great difficulty did I keep a perfectly straight face. “What kind of investigation?”
“This time he was following a trail he had picked up at Fort Bragg. I don’t know much about it. Some group of soldiers helping train a bunch of hicks to blow up and burn synagogues and Black churches. Nobody took it too seriously. From what I hear, he was always finding new leads for his story, and they always went nowhere.”
“And that’s why he was here?”
“According to Bob Barrows, his editor, it’s one of the things he was checking on. Remember that string of church arsons about a year back? Berkowitz thought the man behind it might be here.”
I said, “You’re kidding.”
She said, “No, really.”
I almost blurted out, “You’re not going to believe this. I think I know exactly who he was looking for.”
I didn’t, though. Partly because my mind suddenly got very busy. It would be an incredible coincidence, but fate owed me a break. Sergeant Major Williams was an expert with a garrote, since all of us in the outfit were taught how to use that ghoulish thing. He’d been thrown out of the outfit for mucking around with a bunch of backwoods, redneck racists. And he had a brutally short fuse and a bent toward cruelty. I could testify to that in excruciating detail. But murder? Yes, I could see that son of a bitch murdering somebody. With a garrote, too. Hell, he’d probably smile as he did it.
Then one more piece of the puzzle suddenly went kaplunk! Maybe this was how Berkowitz knew about the existence of the outfit. Maybe he had a source somewhere who told him about Williams, and maybe that same source put him on to me.