The Buck Passes Flynn (2 page)

Flynn came through the men’s room door showing everyone in the corridor his most beguiling smile.

The Secret Service agents, good lads that they are, gasped and reached for their guns.

“Is there another men’s room nearby?” Flynn asked innocently. “This one’s occupied.”

“N.N. 13,” Flynn said into the telephone.

In the lobby of the Hotel Waldorf-Astoria, Flynn had dialed the Pittsburgh number and given the operator his credit-card number.

The man who answered drawled, “Are you free?”

“Yes. I’m in New York.”

“One moment, please.”

In the lobby Flynn watched a man and a woman greet each other. He guessed her clothes cost thousands of dollars. The man’s suit and shoes, too, looked as if they cost plenty. Nearby stood a little girl. Dressing her had probably cost hundreds of dollars. Scanning everyone in the lobby, Flynn wondered what the total value of their clothes was. Probably more dollars than it took to dress the entire Continental Army.

“13?”

“Yes,” Flynn answered.

“Zero. 1600. Lions’ cage, the zoo.”

“Rightio,” said Flynn. “Rightio.”

DOWN the path the little man stood near the lions’ cage. Three tall men were standing around him.

Flynn knew N.N. Zero—John Roy Priddy—liked places where there were apt to be other small human beings—playgrounds, circuses, zoos. N.N. Zero was three feet ten inches high.

Flynn had bought two bags of peanuts.

“Hello, Frank.” N.N. Zero reached up to shake hands.

“Hello, sir.” Flynn did not stoop. From all the years working with N.N. Zero, Flynn knew well it was no kindness to stoop to him. It was a cruelty.

N.N. Zero was a little person, and he spoke softly.

Flynn maintained his posture and was grateful for his acute hearing.

N.N. Zero looked absently around at the three men with him.

They absented themselves.

There was calliope music,
Octopus’s Garden
.

“How’s Elsbeth?” N.N. Zero asked.

“Fine.”

“Todd?”

“Fine.”

“Randy?”

“Fine.”

Flynn handed N.N. Zero a bag of peanuts.

N.N. Zero handed Flynn a fifty-dollar bill.

Flynn glanced at it and put it in his pocket.

“Jenny?”

“Fine.”

“Winny?”

“Fine.”

“Jeff?”

“Fine.”

N.N. Zero was always solicitous about Flynn’s wife and children, asking for them each in order. He actually knew each of their characteristics as well, even to twelve-year-old Jenny not yet knowing she was gorgeous and nine-year-old Winny not yet knowing his compulsion to be a wit.

“Well, Frank. Did you knock off the President?”

“Before lunch.”

“Was he appreciative?”

“He seemed mostly appreciative I didn’t mess up his shirt. He had to give a speech.”

“Running a private organization like N.N., Frank, we’ll always need funds, and we’ll always need access to the President of the United States. And as long as there is a K., there’s a need for N.N. Yet no President, once he’s told about us, believes in us much. We have to prove ourselves to every President, in some personal way….”

N.N. Zero opened his bag and threw a peanut into the lions’ cage.

At the back of the cage lay a lion and a lioness. They were flea-bitten and fat but pretty together.

N.N. Zero asked, “Are you ready for an odd story, Frank?”

“The Irish love a story,” said Francis Xavier Flynn, N.N. 13. “Don’t we just?”

“Trouble is,” said N.N. Zero, “we don’t know the
beginning of this story. Nor do we know the end of it. Maybe we’re putting three things together that don’t belong together. I don’t know. Odd things have happened at three different places on the map. And I think they may have something in common. And even if they do, I’m not sure what it is, or what to make of it. The most recent event—if these are events—concerns us.”

Flynn shelled a peanut and tossed it into the lions’ cage.

Neither lion moved.

“About twelve weeks ago,” N.N. Zero said, “there were one thousand eight hundred and fifty-six people, men, women, and children, living in the town of Ada, Texas. Today, as far as we know, there are two.

“One day the minister in that town, a Reverend Sandy Fraiman, called the office of the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Austin, and said that everyone in the town, except himself and his wife, had disappeared.”

“Disappeared?” Flynn rubbed his ear. “This isn’t a flying-saucer story, is it? I don’t like flying-saucer stories. They upset my equilibrium.”

“Everyone had left town except the minister and his wife.”

“‘Left town.’ Of their own volition, I take it. Tell me, sir. Do you think the man’s sermons had been runnin’ overlong? Were the people fleein’ them, do you think?”

“The minister watched them leave. He called the F.B.I. on a Thursday. He said people had begun to leave town on the previous Saturday. More than half the town had left by Sunday night. The rest were gone by Wednesday. They simply packed up their cars and pickup trucks with personal belongings, and left. The minister stopped some of them and asked where they were going. Some said Dallas. Some said Oklahoma. Some said Las Vegas. Some said California.”

“And none said the Promised Land? No wonder the minister was upset.”

“The F.B.I. agent drove to Ada next day. He confirmed there appeared to be no one in town except the minister and his wife. He reported the minister appeared ‘shaky.’ ”

“No wonder. He was the shepherd whose flock had escaped up the glen, waggin’ their tails behind ’em.”

“Get this, Flynn. After some questioning, the minister told the agent that on the previous Saturday morning he had found two large manila envelopes on his front porch, one with his name on it, one with his wife’s name on it. In each envelope was one hundred thousand dollars in cash. Mostly fifty-dollar bills, some one hundreds, some twenties.”

“Manna from Heaven.”

“Exactly. The minister was delighted. He believes it’s a gift to the church. It’s a poor town, and apparently the church is in great disrepair. The F.B.I. agent filed his report, of course.”

“Of course.”

“The next week.”

“Of course.”

“A copy came to us in the pouch. A week after that.”

Flynn tossed some peanuts he had shelled into the lions’ cage.

“This made us mildly curious,” N.N. Zero continued, “to see if any such similar incident had happened to any other small town in the United States. We discovered that in a small town in New England, the ministers left, and the townspeople stayed. East Frampton, Massachusetts—”

“I know the old place. Took my kids there summer before last. We ate at a—”

“A small island community, utterly dependent upon the tourist trade and a little fishing. Nothing more to worry about, if you’d believe it, than squashing rumors
a shark with a yen for human flesh basted in suntan oil is prowling their waters.”

“Not a refined taste, I think.”

“The captain of the ferryboat, who lives on the mainland, mentioned to a fellow member of Kiwanis, who is a policeman in New Bedford, who told his chief, who mentioned it to the local F.B.I. agent—”

“Not a direct source comin’ straight at us,” commented Flynn.

“—that suddenly every trip he took his ferry was loaded with expensive new appliances and cars—Mercedes, Cadillacs, Lincolns, Jaguars—all for delivery to the citizens of East Frampton. Maybe even more significantly, the clergy had suddenly left the town. The Congregational minister and his wife left suddenly to tour Europe. The Catholic priest bolted to join the missionaries.”

“So,” said Flynn. “In this case the shepherds left their flocks.”

“Nothing happened until Fourth of July weekend. An unlikely riot broke out in the town. Suddenly, Saturday night, the townspeople attacked the tourists. They routed them out of the guest houses; threw them bodily out of the restaurants and bars; beat them with oars and baseball bats and whiskey bottles—literally chased them up the road to Frampton. Needless to say, the town derived not one penny more from the tourist industry that summer.”

“I read about the riot,” Flynn said. “Just high spirits on a holiday weekend, wasn’t it? Once those things start…”

N.N. Zero had continued to place unshelled peanuts in the lions’ cage, one by one.

The lioness blinked lazily in the sunlight.

The lion yawned.

“Last Monday,” N.N. Zero said, “an air force major, working in a most sensitive Intelligence department at the Pentagon, reported that on Saturday morning he found a manila envelope on the seat of
his car, with his name on it. Inside the envelope was one hundred thousand dollars in cash.”

“My, my.” In the middle of the pavement a shoe-shine boy was kneeling, polishing the shoes of a man in a green suit. The knees of the boy’s jeans were torn. “Did anyone else in the department receive a similar Easter basket?”

“Only one other says so—a first lieutenant named DuPont, fresh from Yale.”

“I see,” said Flynn. “Possibly independently wealthy.”

N.N. Zero was still reaching out and placing peanuts in the lions’ cage, one by one.

“However,” sighed N.N. Zero, “during that weekend, the department’s general and one colonel applied for early retirement; the other colonel ordered a twenty-eight-foot Mariner sloop. A technician is known to have eloped. Monday morning, the department’s head secretary called in sick, but there was no one at her apartment….”

“We must find out whoever is doing this,” proclaimed Flynn, “and give him my address!”

Across the pavement a ragpicker was going through a trash container. Her stockings hung down to one cracked brown shoe, one cracked black shoe.

“Was there a chaplain associated with the Intelligence department?”

“Not specifically.”

A middle-aged woman went by them on roller-skates.

“The syllogism wobbles,” said Flynn.

“A small town in Oregon went berserk in August. But it was discovered some kids had fed a chemical hallucinogen into the town’s water supply.”

“Boys will be boys.”

“These were girls.”

“Girls will be, too.”

“Frank, some experiments were carried out during World War II—one nation’s trying to flood an enemy
nation with false currency. K. has tried it too, as you know, in Israel, Chile, Iran. There was never enough of it to make that much difference.”

“That can’t be happening here,” said Flynn. “A relatively small amount of money, dropped on three points of the compass over a six-month period. Doesn’t sound like the handiwork of K. to me at all.”

“They could be experimenting. Texas. Massachusetts. Washington. That’s what frightens me.”

“Are we dealing with funny money?” Flynn asked. “You didn’t say that.”

“There’s a sample in your pocket.”

Flynn took the fifty-dollar bill N.N. Zero had given him out of his pocket and examined it.

“That one is from Ada, Texas. The minister sold it to us for another fifty-dollar bill.” N.N. Zero handed Flynn a one-hundred-dollar bill and a twenty. “These are from our major in the Pentagon. From him we could appropriate the whole sum.”

“Did you give him a receipt?”

“We will, Frank. We will.”

“Thank you.” Flynn examined the three bills. The thought of sitting down to a New England boiled dinner crossed his mind. “My, my,” he said, putting the bills in his pocket.

The lions had not moved in their cage at all. The female had fallen asleep, her head on the male’s flank.

The front of their cage was a mess of shelled and unshelled peanuts.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to keep you away from your cover job with the Boston Police awhile longer, Frank. And from your kids.”

Flynn thought of the tall brown Victorian house on Boston Harbor and the noise and other music that came out of it.

Again he felt the desire for a New England boiled dinner.

“We have to find the source of this money,” N.N. Zero said. “Who is dropping money—maybe millions
of dollars—on unsuspecting people, and why he is doing it. You call me in the morning, Frank, and tell me what you need.”

Down to their left, N.N. Zero’s three bodyguards stood near an aviary.

“You didn’t get your family over to the farm in Ireland this summer,” N.N. Zero said.

“There wasn’t time. Between one thing and another.”

“Putting you up there in Boston, I meant to be putting you on ice.”

“I know.”

N.N. Zero stood close beside him, which was something the little man seldom did with tall people.

“What do you think, Frank?”

“Well,” said Flynn. “I don’t think lions like peanuts at all.”

“WHERE are you calling from, Frank?”

“Austin, Texas, sir. You told me to let you know this morning what I’ll need.”

“Shoot.” N.N. Zero’s voice was as clear as if he were standing next to Flynn. He could have been anywhere in the world at that point, but could still be reached at the same Pittsburgh relay telephone number.

And the line was always scrambled.

“The names of all the citizens of Ada, Texas, and East Frampton, Massachusetts.”

“Right. The F.B.I. lifted the town records from Ada.”

“The names should be gone through to see if any of their citizens or ex-citizens made themselves particularly wealthy.”

“Will do.”

“Plus whatever photographs of the citizens of Ada you can develop from old military records, police files, whatever.”

“Where do we send it?”

“Las Vegas. Casino Royale. I’ll be arriving there in a day or two.”

“Any new thoughts, Frank?”

“No, sir. Just don’t think we should start an international scare if we’re dealing with just one good old boy who’s turned generous in the face of the Grim Reaper.”

“Find the source of the money, right?”

“You might also have a list of the individuals in this world who have the odd four hundred million mackerels to plop in the sea. There can’t be many of them. Inquiries should be made of them.”

“You think anyone that eccentric would tell the truth?”

“I don’t know he wouldn’t,” said Flynn. “I’ve never been that eccentric, myself. I’ve never had the money.”