The Fool's Run (4 page)

"I'll think about it," I said. "I have to do more research. On you, on Whitemark, on what we might do. I'll get back."

"How long?"

I shrugged. "A week."

He nodded. "A week, then. If you would go with Ms. Kahn, she will give you a copy of a report on Whitemark. And you can take this copy of Dillon's report." He pushed the black-bound typescript across the desk at me, stood, and rubbed his big wrinkled hands together. "Goddamn," he said. "I'm going to enjoy this."

Maggie said, "Follow me, please."

Dillon, who hadn't said a thing, followed us out of the office and turned the other way down the corridor, leaving Anshiser alone. Maggie led me to a smaller office and gestured at a chair as she settled behind her desk. There were two walls of bookshelves packed with texts and references, another window overlooking the lake, and a long oak table stacked with more books.

"You need a painting in here," I said.

"Send me one." She turned on her desk terminal, typed in a series of passwords, and punched a PRINT command. The Whitemark report churned out of a high-speed printer. In thirty seconds I had a sheaf of computer paper that ended with a list of names and job titles.

"That's as up-to-date as we can make it. It was good last week." She looked a bit haggard. For the first time I noticed the fine lines near the corners of her eyes, incipient crow's-feet.

"Frightened?" I asked.

"No, no. I'm a believer," she said, looking up at me. "But there will be problems. They're inevitable. We have a lot of complicated operations in our business. I've learned one thing about them: something will go wrong. Nothing ever works out quite the way you wanted it to. Nothing. With this operation, the consequences of error could be severe."

We talked for another minute, then she led the way back to the stairs and we circled down the staircase to the front entry. The chauffeur was waiting there with a package wrapped in brown paper.

"What's that?" Maggie asked.

"A painting from the waiting room," the chauffeur said. He handed it to me. "Mr. Anshiser said you should look at it while you think." He spread his hands in a gesture of incomprehension. "I don't know what it means. That's just what he said."

The picture, even with the thick fruitwood frame, was light in my hands. A Whistler.

With the Whistler under my arm, I decided against another night in Chicago and had the chauffeur drop me at O'Hare. On the flight back to St. Paul I thumbed through Dillon's report.

Whitemark headquarters, which included design and research facilities, were in Virginia, outside Washington. The company's main assembly plants were in North Carolina. If I took the job, we'd work out of a Washington suburb, so we'd be in the local call area of the Whitemark computer center. The report listed the names of the company's top officers, manufacturing personnel, and engineers. I made a note to call Bobby with the list.

Whitemark was founded by an eccentric electronics enthusiast named Harry Whitemark in the mid-twenties. Originally, the company manufactured radios. It barely survived the '29 crash, and in the thirties went into avionics. During World War II, the company rebuilt civilian planes as specialized light observation aircraft. When Korea came along, it refitted helicopters with special radio gear needed for medivacs and the increasingly complex ground-air networks.

Whitemark got into the fighter business almost by accident. In the seventies, the company found itself without a dominant stockholder, and Whitemark execs liked it that way. Nobody interfered with them, but there was one large fly in the soup.

The company was undervalued and cash-heavy, a sitting duck for a takeover. They looked for a way out and found a lowbrowed ne'er-do-well named Winton Woormly IV.

Woormly had inherited a majority holding in a medium-sized aviation company. The company specialized in jet trainers and small ground-support aircraft, marketing them in third world countries that couldn't afford the big stuff. Woormly was smart enough to understand that, if he tried to run the company himself, he'd screw up and lose it. Besides, he wasn't interested. He was interested in single-malt Scotch, ocean racers, polo, trout fishing, and young boys, in that order.

Whitemark offered him a deal; they'd give him a big lump of cash, a special issue of stock, and a place on the Whitemark board. In return, Woormly would turn over his controlling interest in the aviation company. Woormly jumped at the deal. He wound up with a title and more money than he could spend. Whitemark got a major stockholder who wasn't interested in running the company and whose stock holdings would scare off pirates. They'd also stripped themselves of excess cash, which made them a less inviting target.

The Woormly buyout was a success from the start. The two companies matched up well. There was always a demand for the ground-support planes. Then came the Hellwolf concept. Whitemark started lifting its eyes to the big leagues.

There was much more in the report: details on the Hellwolf, speculation about flight trials and cost overruns, arguments in the military press over the advantages and disadvantages of the Hellwolf versus the Sunfire.

I was still reading when the wheels came down. Out the window, the dark ribbon of the Mississippi curled through the lights of the cities, separating St. Paul from Minneapolis, the red-brick East from the chrome-and-glass West. I caught a cab into St. Paul, the Whistler on my lap.

The cat was out roaming the rooftops when I got home. I found a hammer, nails, and hangers, and hung the Whistler on the big interior wall of the studio, surrounded by the work of friends and personal heroes. The other work ranged from simple sketches in India ink to slashing Expressionist stuff in electric acrylics. The Whistler, simple as it was, dominated them. Age and power. The shamans are right.

I got a bottle of beer from the refrigerator and walked around and looked at it some more. I was still looking when Emily knocked at the door.

"You're back," she said. Emily has steel-gray hair pulled into a bun at the nape of her neck, like a nineteenth-century English schoolteacher. She's usually wrapped in a woolen shawl. If it weren't for the flinty sparkles in her dark eyes, you might take her for Whistler's aunt. "I thought you were gone until tomorrow. I heard the pounding and thought I should check."

"C'mere." I crooked a finger at her. She followed me into the studio and spotted the new piece immediately. From where she stood she recognized it, and said, "Holy shit! Is it real?"

"Yeah."

"What have you done?"

"Nothing, yet."

"It must be pretty extreme, whatever it is," she said. She grabbed my upper arm with a surprisingly strong hand. "I hope you don't get hurt."

"I'll be careful," I said. "You want a beer?"

"Sure."

When I came back from the kitchen with a longneck Leinenkugel, her nose was a quarter inch from the sketch. "Little Jimmy Whistler," she said. "You know he learned to draw at West Point? Flunked out. Couldn't pass chemistry. Years later he said, 'If silicon was a gas, I'd be a general now.' He was probably right. He was at West Point just before the Civil War. West Pointers got quick promotions."

We looked at the picture some more, and then she went back to her apartment, and I went into the study to call Bobby.

What?

Need everything available on Whitemark Aerospace. Top execs with personal data. Access control to all internal computer systems. Any trouble with the law, political connections, business connections. Need soonest; will pay big bux.

Hundreds or thousands?

Stop for now at $5,000; could be much more later. May need major backup for big project. Also need information on Rudolph Anshiser, his secretary Maggie Kahn, assistant named Dillon, and other key Anshiser personnel. Also data on company.

Leave terminal on receive.

If I was going to do it, I'd need help.

A few minutes after midnight I walked into town for a snack. When the American fries and eggs were on the grill, I stepped across the street to the Greyhound station and called long distance to the Wee Blue Inn, a beer joint down by the Superior docks in Duluth. A man answered.

"Weenie?"

"This is him."

"This is the art guy from St. Paul. I came in that time with your girlfriend?"

"Yeah."

"I need to see her. I'm coming through town tomorrow at two o'clock. If you see her around, let her know?"

"Yeah. I don't know if I'll see her.

"Sure. But if you do."

"Okay."

LuEllen is a thief. She steals only from the rich, for the excellent reason that they're the only people worth stealing from. Jewelry, coin and stamp collections, bearer bonds, cash. She's never ripped off a stereo in her life.

I met her one hot summer night when she was breaking into a neighboring apartment. I was lying in a hammock on the roof outside my living room window, lights out, looking at the stars. I was almost asleep when I heard a clunk at the opposite end of the building. It was an odd sound-distinct, but furtive. I crawled across the tarpaper roof and peered over the edge. A slight, dark figure was climbing the wall opposite mine, a woman, moving like a professional gymnast. She'd thrown a muffled grappling hook over the balcony outside the third-floor apartment, and was swinging up the rope hand over hand.

I watched her slip over the balcony rail, pause, apparently listening, then pull the rope up behind her. A second later she was at work on the sliding glass doors. They were open in less than a minute, and I heard a telephone ringing. The woman went inside, and the ringing stopped.

The apartment belonged to a fat, unpleasant political hack with bad breath and size 15AAAA feet, who delighted in bragging about the strange things he does to hookers in Las Vegas, and sometimes to women who need his help in the City Hall turf wars. I didn't think I'd feel too bad if he was hit by a burglar.

In the next few seconds I went through a one-hand-other-hand sequence. On the one hand, I wouldn't mind seeing him hit, but on the other hand, it was a bad precedent to let my own apartment house get burglarized. The word could get around the crack houses that it was an easy target, although the woman who had just gone in the window seemed too smooth to be the typical smash-and-grab doper.

On occasion I had gone places uninvited, though not usually to steal so much as to look. I look at chips, plans, production schemes. The places I had gone were factories and offices, never homes or places where people might gather. And I always had inside help. Still, watching the thief go into the apartment, I felt a spark of collegiality. We weren't in quite the same business, but there were similarities.

A few seconds after she went through the sliding doors, I eased back across the roof and into my apartment. I found my auto-everything Nikon still loaded with a roll of Tri-X. I clipped on the strobe and went back out on the roof. Two minutes later she appeared. When she turned toward me, ready to go over the balcony rail, I hit her with the strobe. She froze, probably blinded. After the strobe recycled, I said "Hello," she looked up at me, and I hit her again, full in the face. Then her voice floated across, quiet but distinct.

"Who's that?"

"A neighbor."

"You alone?"

"At the moment. I'm thinking about calling the cops."

"Don't do that. Wait there a minute, and I'll be over. Will you buzz me in?"

I thought about it, thought about the fat fixer, and said, "Yeah."

She went over the balcony rail and down the wall. When she was on the ground, she did something to the rope, and it dropped to her feet. She coiled it and turned the corner, out of sight. It was a full half-minute before I started to feel foolish. She wasn't coming back, she'd be halfway to Minneapolis. I was actually surprised when the doorbell rang.

A few minutes later she stood in the hall outside my apartment, trying to look earnest while I peered at her through the peephole. She was a small woman with an oval face and dark, close-cropped hair. She wore a bright red jacket and jeans.

"Are you going to let me in?" she asked through the door.

"Take off your clothes."

"What?"

"Take off your clothes. Everything. I don't want you bringing in a gun."

She didn't argue, just began peeling off clothes. When her underpants came off, I opened the door.

"Turn around," I said. She turned around. If she was carrying a gun, it was hidden under the butterfly tattoo on her left hip. I opened the door all the way.

"Ease on by, and keep your hands away from your clothes," I said. She walked past me, looking me over. I picked up the pile of clothes and carried them in behind her.

"Look," she said, as I shook them down. There was a pleading note in her voice. "I'm a former. friend of that asshole over there. He had some of my stuff and wouldn't give it back. I had to get in. Please don't tell him. He'll send his cop friends after me."

"What did you take?"

She cast her eyes down at the floor. With a heartbroken sign, she said, "Marijuana. I kept a stash over there. That's why you can't call the cops."

It was an impressive performance, especially done extemporaneously, bare-ass naked in a stranger's apartment. "Did you make that story up on the spot, or did you think it up days ago, just in case, or what?" I asked curiously.

"It's the truth."

"Bullshit. I told you to take off your clothes and you didn't hesitate. You stand there with your hands on your hips and don't even pretend to cover up. You wouldn't do that to protect a stash. Not unless you're crazy. And look at this jacket-bright red, reversible to black. I saw the way you went up that wall. You're some kind of pro."

She looked at me for a moment and frowned, unsure of herself. "What are we going to do about this?" she asked. There might have been an offer in the question, but it wasn't explicit. I caught myself staring.

"Take a good look, sucker," she snarled.

"Sorry," I mumbled. I tossed her clothes to her, feeling like a pervert. When she was dressed, we talked.

She had taken ten thousand in small bills out of the fat man's apartment. The money was intended by him as lubricant on a bar license question. She had no plans to visit the apartment complex again, unless, she admitted, somebody else showed up with ten thousand in untraceable cash.

"He can't even complain that it was stolen, because then he might have to tell somebody like the IRS where he got it," she said.

"Neat." I walked back to the kitchen, got the Nikon, rolled the film back, popped it out, and tossed her the cassette.

"For your scrapbook," I said. "Want a beer?"

She did. Several, in fact. I had several myself. Late at night we found ourselves laughing immoderately at some modest witticisms. Even later she shed her clothes again.

"How come you didn't hit on me when I had my clothes off before?" she asked, propping herself up on a pillow.

"We hadn't been properly introduced," I said.

"You were thinking about it."

"Maybe."

Since then she's visited me a few times, and one cold February we had a pleasant two-week trip to the Bahamas. I've visited her a couple of times in Duluth, which is her hometown, where she never steals. I've never been to her house, or apartment. I don't know where it is, or even that LuEllen is her real name. She's a pro, and she's cautious to the point of paranoia. She picks her targets carefully-never anything too big, never anything that will attract major attention. She takes down $125,000 or $150,000 a year. Some fifty thousand goes into investments. She lives modestly on another forty thousand or so, and drops the rest on expenses, ponies, and cocaine. Every year she pays two thousand to the IRS on nonexistent wages from the Wee Blue Inn; Weenie declares her imaginary $15,000 salary as a business expense.

Weenie is her phone drop. If she was out of town, he'd have told me that he didn't know where she was. Since he didn't tell me that, she was in town, and he'd let her know I was coming. Whether or not she showed up was up to her.

Duluth is a seaport built around the grain and iron ore docks. There were two big Russian freighters taking on wheat at the docks, and a long, low ore carrier was headed out.

The Wee Blue Inn, which is neither wee nor blue, sits on the first bank level above the lake, at the base of the big hill that makes up the heart of the city. It's the kind of place where the bartender throws sawdust on the floor and calls it decor. Eggs and sausage float in scum-filled jars on the bar, sacks of garlic potato chips and cheese balls hang from wall racks, and the mirror was last cleaned in the fifties. Weenie is fat, chews a toothpick, and wears a boat-shaped, white paper hat. He was behind the bar when I arrived a few minutes after two.