“We’ve looked at that one,” Bennington replied, “and our decision is no.
The nuclear program has always been strictly Qaddafi’s work. He keeps his own Palestinians on a tight leash and under close guard. His relations with Arafat and the PLO have been more than strained since he broke with them because he accused them of being too ready to compromise. And our voice analysts have now confirmed that that’s his voice on the original tape.”
“Better late than never,” the President tartly observed. “Do we have anything new from New York?”
Before William Webster of the FBI could answer, the red warning light on the Deputy Secretary of State’s telephone flashed. “Sir,” he said, after listening a second, “the operations center is pulling in a Cherokee NODIS
from Tripoli.” A Cherokee NODIS was the State Department’s highest cable priority, a term assigned it by Dean Rusk in honor of his native Cherokee County, Georgia. “We’ll have it in a second.”
In the Department’s seventh-floor operations center the incoming coded text was automatically fed into a computer which decoded it instantaneously and printed a clear text on the duty officer’s cable console. He, in turn, relayed it immediately to the White House communications center, where a warrant officer pushed a button on another console that spewed out a printed text as fast as the cable’s words rose on the screen. The Deputy Secretary had barely hung up his phone when the warrant officer handed the message to Eastman.
“Sir,” he said, glancing at it, “the charg6 has just spoken personally with Qaddafi.”
“And?”
“And he says everything he has to say is in his original message. He refuses to talk to you.”
The New York Police Department, Gerald Putman thought, is a much maligned body. He had not even bothered to report his wallet to the police as lost or stolen, assuming, as he supposed any citizen in a similar situation would, that his report would be lost in a morass of bureaucratic indifference and ineptitude. Yet here in his office were an obviously senior detective, the head of the Pickpocket Squad and a federal officer, all trying to help him establish what had happened to his wallet.
“All right, Mr. Putman,” Angelo Rocchia said, “let’s just go through that one more time. You spent all Friday morning here in this office. Then, at about…’
“Twelve-thirty.”
The detective checked his notebook. “Right. You went over to the Fulton Fish Market to Luigi’s for lunch. At approximately two P.M. you reached for your wallet to get your American Express card to pay the check and found your wallet was missing, right?”
“Right.”
“You returned here, where you keep a record of all your credit card numbers, and had your secretary call them to report the loss.”
“That’s correct, Officer.”
“And you didn’t bother to notify the local precinct?”
Putman gave Angelo an awkward smile. “I’m sorry, Officer, I just thought that with everything you people have to do these days, something like this would, you know …” His voice dwindled to an embarrassed mumble.
The detective returned the smile, but his gray eyes were cold and appraising. Angelo liked to give people like Putman the impression he was a little slow, a bit of a plodder. It never hurt to disarm a client, to get him to relax a bit. Putman was in his midthirties, medium height, a trifle stocky, with a dark tan and a swarthy complexion. Maybe an Italian had wandered into the bed of one of Putman’s WASP ancestors, Angelo mused.
“Now, Mr. Putman, let’s go over everything that happened to you that day very slowly, very carefully. First of all, where do you keep your wallet?”
“Right here.” Putman tapped the right hip pocket of his pants. He was wearing gray slacks, a blue button-down shirt and a striped tie. Everything in his office, the thick wall-to-wall carpeting, the understated mahogany furniture, the huge window looking over to the tip of Manhattan, indicated upper-middle-class affluence.
“You were wearing an overcoat, I suppose?” This time the question came from the head of the Pickpocket Squad whom Feldman had ordered to meet Angelo here.
“Oh yes,” Putman replied. “I’ve got it right there.”
He walked to a closet and took out a Cheviot tweed coat he had bought at Burberry’s in London. The head of the Pickpocket Squad examined it, then slipped his fingers up its high-cut center vent.
“Convenient.” He smiled.
Methodicallyţ prompted by Angelo, Putman recreated his activities of Friday, December 11. He’d gotten up at 7 A.M. in his home in Oyster Bay.
His wife had driven him, as she did regularly, to the station, where he’d bought The Wall Street Journal and waited only two minutes on the platform for the 8:07 Long Island Rail Road train. On the way in, he had sat next to his friend and squash partner Grant Esterling, an IBM executive. He’d gotten off, as always, at the Flatbush Avenue Terminal and walked the rest of the way to his office. He remembered absolutely nothing unusual, out of the way, on the train, at the terminal or on his ten-minute walk to the office: no one bumping into him, no one shoving him, no jarring movement, nothing.
When be had finished, the room was so quiet that all four men could hear the tick-tock of the old-fashioned grandfather’s clock in one corner of Putman’s office. Rand impatiently crossed, then uncrossed his legs.
“It sounds like we got a very artistic bit of work here,” the head of the Pickpocket Squad noted with respect.
“It sure does.” Angelo made a swift doodle in his notepad, a stick figure of a doll. My good idea, he mused, doesn’t look so good anymore. He rose.
“Mr. Putman,” he said, “we’re going to show you some pictures. Take all the time you want to look at them. Study them very carefully and tell us if you think you’ve ever seen any of these people anywhere before.”
If travel broadened, the young men and women in the procession of photographs Angelo laid one by one on Putman’s desk should have constituted a unique cultural elite. Only a handful of experienced travelers could claim the knowledge of the capitals of the world they possessed. No great international gathering from the Olympic Games in Montreal or Lake Placid, the election of a Pope in the Vatican, the Queen’s Jubilee in London, the World Cup in Buenos Aires could be celebrated without their presence. They were the best of the world’s pickpockets, and, almost without exception, the dark-haired, dark-complexioned youths in the mug shots passing through Gerald Putman’s hands were Colombian.
As the Basque country exports shepherds, Antwerp diamond cutters, so that Latin American nation exported coffee, emeralds, cocaine-and pickpockets.
There were in the miserable calles of Bogota, the Colombian capital, a whole series of Faginesque pickpocketing schools. Poor farm children were literally sold into servitude to the schools’ masters to learn the trade.
In the Plaza Bolivia, along the Avenue Santander, they were taught every trick of the art, how to slit a pocket with a razor, open unnoticed a handbag, pluck a Rolex watch from an unsuspecting wrist. As a graduation exercise they had to demonstrate fingers so skilled they could slip a wallet from a pocket to which was sewn a line of jingle bells without causing a single bell to ring.
Once trained, they assembled into teams of twos and threes, because a good dip never worked alone, and fanned out all over the world in search of the crowds, conventions, tourists and unsuspecting pockets from which they extracted well over a million dollars a year.
Putman had gone through almost fifty photos when suddenly he stopped and stared at the photo of a girl, dark rolls of hair falling to her shoulders, her breasts thrusting challengingly against a tightly drawn white silk blouse.