Carnival of Shadows (45 page)

He soon stopped laughing when he realized that Laura wasn’t sharing the joke.

“And you believe this?” he asked her. “You think that the dead man was killed by the authorities, and that they sent me here to clean it all up and make it disappear?”

“Wouldn’t be the first time, would it?” Laura asked. “It’s true, isn’t it? I mean, the whole thing with the authorities. I mean, they can do whatever they like with anyone, can’t they? My sister’s neighbor said that the government can just make someone vanish, and not only do they vanish, but every record of them just disappears as well. It’s like they never even existed.”

“That’s just crazy talk, Laura,” Travis said, at once amazed that a woman such as this would possess such notions, but even as he heard his own response, he felt that his words possessed an element of hollowness and self-doubt. “I’m sorry to disappoint you, but I am not in Seneca Falls to cover up a government murder.”

“Well, I just hope that’s the truth, because now I’ve put myself right in the firing line.”

“You honestly believe that I’m the kind of person who would be capable of that?”

“Well, to be truthful, I don’t really know who you are, ’cept that you grew up with no parents and you don’t much care for people helping you. You could be anyone, couldn’t you? Your name might not even be what you say it is. We don’t know a thing about you, and yet you can come in here and ask all the questions you like and we’re obliged to answer them. If you want to hear something uncomfortable, then you’d do worse than to listen to my uncle. He says the only difference between a Communist dictatorship and the United States is the longitude and latitude. Now, I don’t happen to agree with him, and I know his views can be a little forceful and intolerant, but I read some of the stuff in the papers about Senator McCarthy and all those people in Hollywood that he terrorized, and I start to wonder about whether what my uncle says is true. I mean, really, that’s not so different, is it? Putting people in prison for their political beliefs and goodness knows what else. Telling them that they have to give up the names of their friends and whoever else, otherwise they’ll lock them up and throw away the key. Seems to me that Senator Joe McCarthy and your Mr. Hoover might be two eggs out of the same box, though I know it’s really dreadful to say something like that, seeing as how you’re a federal agent and everything.”

Laura looked down at her hands. She had been twisting a cloth between her fingers the whole time. “And now I’ve run my mouth off and said a great deal more than I intended to say, but you asked me, and if you’ve got to arrest me, then so be it. Danny always said I was never afraid to share my opinion, even when it was clear that no one else wanted to hear it.”

“Arrest you?” Travis asked. “And what would I arrest you for?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Some of those un-American activities, probably.”

Travis didn’t know what to think. Laura McCaffrey certainly had a viewpoint, and yes, she had shared it with him, but had he been asked to predict what she would say, it would have been very far from what he’d just heard. For one so young, she seemed to carry a great weight of cynicism.

Her manner changed then; she softened noticeably and said, “You seem like a good man, Michael Travis. I felt that from the first time I met you. Intense, serious, very dedicated to what you were doing, but a good man. Danny says I can see things in people that other folks don’t see. That’s part of the reason I was so interested in what was happening at the carnival. All that stuff, reading people’s minds, telling the future, all the gypsy things you hear about. That kind of thing fascinates me. Always has, probably always will. Anyway, I met you and you seemed too focused and committed, but there was something so lost about you, and I just felt…”

Laura looked up at Travis. Were there tears in her eyes?

“What, Laura? You felt what?”

“I don’t know, Michael. You just seemed like the loneliest person in the whole world.”

Travis reached out and touched her hand. “Well, if I wasn’t then, I think I probably am now,” he said.

“Well, whatever they say about you, I still think you’re a decent man,” Laura said. “Maybe Danny is wrong. Maybe I can no more read people than I can read Japanese, but there’s something good about you. I feel that. I also think that you’re going to do the right thing.”

“And you wouldn’t happen to know what that was, would you?” Travis asked.

“Oh, I think we always know what the right thing is, wouldn’t you say? I think we’re just wired that way. I think being a decent person comes naturally to most of us. The bad guys are the ones who have it rough. I think they have to work extra hard to overcome basic human nature, you know?”

“I appreciate your optimism, though my experience tells me that it might be unfounded.”

“Hey, maybe you’ve just been spending too much time around the wrong kind of people,” she replied. “And I hope you’re not mad at me. Maybe I said some things I shouldn’t have said.”

“Maybe you did,” Travis replied, “but that doesn’t mean I didn’t need to hear them.” He reached out his hand then, closed it over hers, and she looked at him with an expression he had never seen before. As if she had been waiting for him to reach out to her forever. “And no, I am not mad at you,” he added. “Could never be mad at you, Laura.”

She closed her eyes for a second and breathed deeply. “And you’re not going to arrest me or my uncle for being Communists?”

“Oh, sure I am,” Travis said. “Didn’t I mention that? Both of you, probably your brothers as well, because I’m sure we can nail them for something, even if we have to fabricate some evidence.”

“We’ll have to go on the run, then,” Laura said.

“Hey, you could run away with Doyle and the others.”

“Great idea. Run away with the circus. Always wanted to do that.”

Travis reached for the bag and the flask.

“Thanks for the sandwiches,” he said.

“You’re very welcome, Michael Travis,” she replied, and then walked with him to the foyer of the hotel.

“Take care,” she said.

“I’ll do my best.”

Travis crossed the street to his car. Before he got in, he glanced back. She was still there, watching him from the window, and when she caught his eye, she raised her hand as if to wave farewell.

He smiled. He did not know whether or not she would see that smile, but he believed she would know it was there.

There was something about the woman that broke his heart. That was the truth. It was perhaps not her, but all she represented. The things he did not have and perhaps would never have.

For the first time, he believed he had made a mistake. Not just an error, not just a wrong step, but a real honest-to-God mistake.

He had trusted everyone above himself. He had believed what he’d been told, and now he was starting to see it for what it was. The curtain had been drawn, and behind the scenes there was something disturbing and malignant. The world as he saw it was not the world as it was. He had been fooled. He knew that now. He had failed to confront that fact for as long as he could manage.

Andris Varga had not been killed by anyone but his own people. Either that, or they were intimately complicit.

Of this he now felt sure.

Michael Travis started the car, and pulled away from the curb. He felt an indescribable weight on his shoulders, and yet for the first time realized he had been carrying that weight for as long as he could recall. It was everything his father had tried to frighten out of him, everything from which his mother had tried to free him.

There was the line. Right before him. Right there in his line of sight. He would step over it, or he would not.

The decision had been made.

Travis glanced in the rearview mirror as Seneca Falls receded into the distance. A small town in the middle of Kansas. Nothing more than that. Probably of insufficient size to even figure on anything beyond a county map. Nevertheless, everything had happened here, and it was here that everything would end.

Travis looked back at the endless road before him, running away toward the horizon like a dark ribbon.

If he knew one thing and one thing only, it was that the life he’d known was now over.

When he reached the highway, he pulled over. He got out of the car and paced up and down. He breathed deeply—in, out, in, out—until he started to feel dizzy. He had to learn the truth about Andris Varga. What had happened between his arrest in June of 1954 and his death in August of 1958? Discover that, and such information would go a long way toward assisting him in making the decision he had to make.

The road that stretched to Travis’s left and right was symbolic. It was one way or the other. He could not rest where he was. He could not just let it all slide, forget about it, give up this case and head back to Kansas. Maybe there were people who could do such a thing. Maybe that was the kind of person that the Bureau wanted—the unthinking, unquestioning, the trusting and doubtless—but Travis could not be that person.

And if Andris Varga had been murdered by the FBI and placed here as a means by which Travis could infiltrate this group of people, then what else did that mean? It meant that everything else that Doyle had said could be true. The newspapers, the government, the drug companies, the arms manufacturers, the banks, the police, the entirety of the legal and judicial machine was riddled with corruption and lies, professing to defend the rights and civil liberties of the common man and yet serving only itself. Keep people afraid, you keep them in check. Foster suspicion, distrust, paranoia, and you controlled them. It was that simple.

Travis walked back to the car. He got in and started the engine. If he could not go to Wichita or Kansas, then he would drive south to Oklahoma City. He knew no one there, and—notwithstanding the possibility that every Bureau field office in the country had been alerted to his identity and the fact that he was to be afforded no assistance—there was no reason he could not access information from there and make some progress on learning what he could of Andris Varga.

It would be another three-hour drive, a straight run down 35 through Wichita and across the state line. Whether the office would be open, he did not know. It was Sunday, granted, but the federal government ran its own calendar. The Oklahoma office would be manned if there was some reason for it to be manned.

Regardless, he had already broken into one office, and he could do it again.

It was now no longer an investigation concerning an unknown Hungarian and a carnival of oddities; it was an investigation into the very organization for whom he worked.

The line was there, and he was going to cross it.

41

The fact that neither of the agents in the Oklahoma City office had heard of Travis raised doubts in his mind. Had they heard of him, it would have confirmed two things: that the Kansas City office had forewarned them that Travis might appear and that Travis was onto something that the Bureau wished to keep under wraps. But then again, even as he was introducing himself to the Oklahoma agents, Travis saw the flaw in his own thinking. Their ignorance could simply mean that maximum care was being taken to preserve the confidentiality of the Seneca Falls investigation. Surely only those who were directly involved in such a cover-up would be apprised of all the facts? Regardless, Travis knew that nothing would move forward until he established the precise whereabouts and movements of Andris Varga prior to his death, and the only way that such a thing seemed feasible was with Bureau resources.

The agents seemed eager to assist Travis in whichever way they could. Ostensibly, he was just another agent in the field; it would have been strange for them to do anything other than offer their unconditional assistance. The junior man, half a dozen years younger than Travis, was called Alan Lacey. The senior agent, of the same rank as Travis but three or four years older, was called Donald Kline. Kline took the lead, asked questions, ventured suggestions. He looked closely at the picture that Travis showed him, the print card, the small diagram of the tattoo.

“You say he is Hungarian?” Kline asked.

“Yes, name of Andris Varga.”

“I worked in New York before I was posted here,” Kline said. “Had a partner who dealt directly with those coming in from Hungary, among other places. This was a couple of years ago, primarily political asylum applications. I am sure there were Hungarians. Or maybe Czechoslovakians…” Kline paused in thought. “No, I’m sure it was Hungary. It was at the time of the civil unrest in ’56.”

“Do you remember any details?”

“No specifics,” Kline said. “The Bureau was interested in the potential espionage aspect, most of Eastern Europe being Communist, but it ran far above my partner’s clearance level and he didn’t move on it. That kind of thing goes out of federal jurisdiction into national security, and then the CIA pick it up.”

“You ever hear of people with tattoos like this?” Travis asked.

“No, never heard of that before.”

“Do you remember any names?”

“I don’t think he ever mentioned names. And even if he had, it would have been nothing more than an offhand comment, you know? And more than two years ago.”

“Do you remember the name of the operation?”

“Yes, that I do remember. It was called Chrysanthemum.”

“Operation Chrysanthemum. And it was a political asylum operation?”

“I really don’t know any specifics, Agent Travis. I’m sorry.”

“Do you know if the case was directed from the New York office?”

“Yes, I’m sure it was. That’s where I was posted at the time. I’ve only been down here six months. I was four years in D.C., six years in New York, and now I’m here for as long as needed.”

“Do you still know anyone in the New York office?”

“Sure, I know all of them… all of them who are still there, for sure.”

Travis looked at Kline, then at Lacey, and then back at Kline.

“I’m sorry, Agent Lacey…”

Lacey smiled and shrugged. “I’m heading out to lunch anyway. You want I should bring you something back?”

Travis declined, but Kline asked for a sandwich, ham on rye, and a bottle of root beer.

Once Lacey had gone, Travis asked Kline to sit with him in Kline’s office. He closed the door behind him, and when he sat down, Kline already had an anxious expression on his face.

“What’s the deal here, Travis?”

“I don’t know that I can actually give you a clear answer on that, Kline, but I am going to ask for your help anyway.”

“Is there something going on here that I should be worried about?”

“Probably, yes,” Travis replied, “but, again, I don’t know that I can be specific about why you should be worried.”

“Are you doing something under the radar?”

“No, not at all. This is a legitimate and authorized investigation, but there’s an aspect of it that concerns me, and that degree of concern has encouraged me to seek assistance outside the state of Kansas. Let’s just leave it at that for now.”

Kline squinted suspiciously. “That doesn’t sound so good to me, Travis. Something isn’t right here. Not right at all.”

“Well, do you want to know enough so that you become implicated, or do you want to help a fellow agent just out of the goodness of your heart?”

“Implicated in what?”

“A potential internal situation that could prove difficult to explain away.”

“Inside the Bureau?”

“Inside, perhaps outside as well. I am not sure.”

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Kline said.

“About what?”

“About those cases back in ’56, the Hungarians and whatever.” He smiled sardonically. “Of all the field offices in all the world, you had to walk into mine.”

“New York would have been the first office I would have contacted anyway,” Travis said, thinking of the arrest sheet he had found in the Kansas City office fire safe. “I already have information that leads me in that direction. You haven’t told me anything that I wouldn’t have discovered with one phone call.”

“So, if you’re willing to call New York and ask them questions, why do you need me?”

“Because I want to avoid having my name come up, if at all possible.”

“Okay,” Kline said, the hesitation evident in his voice. “Now I’m really not liking the sound of this. This is a transparent network, my friend. The Bureau is the Bureau. Just because I’m out in Oklahoma doesn’t give me any greater distance from this. If I’m going to be putting my hand in a hornet’s nest, I want to know why, and I want to know what the implications are.”

Travis leaned back and took a moment to breathe. He could not, and he did not wish to tell Kline anything, not only for the sake of self-preservation, but also because Kline hadn’t done anything to warrant the backlash he might experience if this went the wrong way.

“Sometimes you do something on trust,” Travis said. “It is a small thing, a seemingly inconsequential thing to you, but for someone else it’s of great significance.”

“I can do without this, Travis,” Kline interjected. “You want my help, then tell me the truth. If you are not prepared to trust me with the truth, then how can you expect me to assist you in any capacity? I am not naive, Agent Travis. I am not some greenhorn, three weeks out of Quantico looking to impress someone. You either come clean on this, or you go ask someone else to help you out.”

Travis weighed up the options that faced him. If he requested the information he wanted from New York, they would be onto him immediately, especially if the information he requested was linked to Varga. If he had Kline do it, then the alert would take a little longer, but it would still happen. Of that he was sure. If the information he requested was not connected to Varga, or—more to the point—if this was not in fact the conspiracy that Edgar Doyle had led him to believe it was, then he would still be left with a dead body, a name he was not supposed to know, and an unresolved homicide investigation.

“Okay,” Travis said. “I will tell you as much as I can.”

“And you will answer my questions when you are done, if I have any,” Kline said.

“If I can answer them, I will,” Travis replied.

“Understood. So what the hell is going on here?”

Travis briefed him as succinctly as he could, leaving out as much as he could without making it obvious.

“So this dead guy, this Andris Varga… you are telling me that he was killed by one of our people?”

“There is that possibility, yes. One of our people, or someone within the intelligence community.”

“No evidence to suggest that’s what happened?”

“No, no evidence.”

“Just a suspicion that there’s more going on here than you’re being told?”

“Exactly.”

Kline smiled ruefully. “Well, that wouldn’t be a first, now, would it?”

Travis didn’t respond. He had displayed as much of his hand as he was prepared to at this stage, and he did not know how Kline would respond. His mouth was dry, his hands moist with sweat, and he could feel his heartbeat in his temples.

“So, if I call New York, what do you want?” Kline asked.

“I want you to call someone you know, someone who might be prepared to send us some information and delay filing the data request for a little while. I just need a head start, Agent Kline, if only for a few hours.”

“Okay, like I asked, what do you want?”

“I want you to give them the dead man’s name and get any information that is flagged as related, whether that is other names, ongoing investigations or inquiries, even closed cases… anything that can be found.”

Kline sat for a while in silence.

“And what will happen then?”

“I don’t know, Agent Kline. I won’t actually know until I get some information back. Right now I have a handful of suppositions and nothing even remotely reliable.”

“And if this is something that I hope it’s not?”

“Then you can make a decision as to whether you want to know or not. Perhaps it would be better if you didn’t know.”

“I don’t believe there is ever a situation where it is better not to know, Agent Travis.”

“Then you and I are of the same mind,” Travis replied.

Kline shifted his chair closer to the desk and reached for the telephone. “It is Sunday,” he said. “There’ll be somebody there, but there’s no way to guarantee they will help us. We may just get a brush-off until tomorrow.”

“Try,” Travis said. “That’s all I can ask of you.”

Kline dialed the number.

Travis rose from his chair and walked to the window of Kline’s office. He was caught between the need to know and the hope that he was wrong, beneath even that the knowledge that here was the pattern of his life. He had made every choice—leaving Esther, joining the army, the Bureau, never committing to anything that required an individual determination—simply because he was afraid of making a mistake. And had that not been the greatest mistake of all?

Travis turned back as Kline started talking to someone.

“Yes, Hungarian, far as I know. Hang on a moment…” Kline covered the mouthpiece. “V-A-R-G-A, right?” he asked Travis.

“Yes, that’s correct.”

Kline went back to the call. He spelled the name, said that he needed anything they had, anything that was flagged as related. He then asked if there was a supervisor or a section chief in the office.

“Okay,” Kline said. “If you could get onto that right away, and just teletype everything you’ve got as soon as you find it, that would be really appreciated.”

The call ended. Kline set down the receiver.

“The angels are on your side,” he told Travis. “No supervisor, no section chief. Don’t know who that was, but he was a new kid, sounded about fifteen. Seemed happy to have something to do. If he even remembers to file a data request, no one is going to see it until tomorrow.”

“Unless there’s an alert on the file itself, and then it will just be automatically flagged,” Travis said. Such a thing was not uncommon. Back when he’d been chasing Tony Scarapetto, every single file relating to Scarapetto, William Murchison, Luke Barrett, Madeline Jarvis, and any other known associates had carried such a flag. If you filed or requested data on any one of them, there was a call within half an hour. Was there new information? Who was chasing what? Had there been a fresh sighting of Scarapetto or Barrett? Perhaps this would be the same. Maybe as soon as New York started transmitting information regarding Varga, there would be a call from Washington.

“You need to settle down,” Kline said. “I don’t know what the hell is going on in your head, Travis, but you are wound like a clock spring, my friend, and something is going to snap. Seems to me you are imagining the worst without any evidence to suggest that the worst is what you’re going to get.”

“You’re right,” Travis said. “I am going around in circles on this thing.”

“Well, I don’t much care to know what it is you’re thinking until we have something substantial to back it up. Assumption, as they say, is the mother of all fuckups.”

Travis laughed suddenly, surprising even himself. He had not heard the expression for as long as he could recall, perhaps as far back as the army. Agents did not use such expressions. It was not Bureau policy. You were polite, professional, mannered, conservative, always distant, unattached, objective. The Bureau was not a job; it was a way of life. It was not a career, it was a vocation. And it required everything of you, everything you had and everything you could give.

“Stop it,” Kline said, snapping Travis out of his reverie. “Enough, okay? Think about something else for a minute, would you? You’re gonna drive yourself crazy.”

“How old are you?” Travis asked.

“Thirty-six, thirty-seven in a couple of months. Why d’you ask?”

“You married? Got kids?”

Kline smiled, frowned a little. “No, and no.”

“You dating someone?”

“What’s with the third degree?”

“Isn’t this what people talk about, Kline, or have you forgotten as well?”

“Oh, Lord, are we having a crisis of faith, Travis?” Kline said, and there was a tone of mock concern in his voice.

“A crisis of faith? Maybe,” Travis replied.

“Been there, done that, as they say.”

“You doubt the Bureau?”

“You really want to have this conversation, Travis? Is that what you want?”

“I think we’re already having it,” Travis replied.

“You don’t think most everyone goes through this at some point? You’re not that unique, my friend.”

Kline reached for a cigarette and lit it. “You know what I think we do sometimes, Agent Travis?”

“What do you think we do, Agent Kline?”

“I think we are there to make sure that the decent, hardworking citizens of this country never see behind the curtain.”

“The curtain?”

“You’ve seen
The Wizard of Oz
, right?”