The Lie (8 page)

“Sit down, sit down,” said the former agent. “Just toss the books off that chair. Can’t remember when I last had a visitor.
Must be important if Tommy Cortlandt gave you my name. Guess it has something to do with what happened to your mother and
father. Heard about it on the radio. Terrible tragedy.”

Paulie cleared the chair of books and sat down. The old spook had a pale, narrow face, translucent with age and surrounded
by a fluff of white hair.

“So what is it?” he asked in English, his accent faintly midwestern. “You’re sure as hell not here to look at my books and
calcifying bones.”

Paulie handed him the pictures from his father’s wall safe. “I understand you were part of this operation. The Falanga hit.”

Meister sat frowning at the photographs. “Where did you dig these up?”

“In my father’s safe.”

“You mean after he and your mother were shot?”

Paulie nodded.

“Now you’re looking to connect them to your parents’ deaths?”

“That’s right.”

“Based on what?”

“They happen to be the only pictures my father ever saved of anything connected with his work.”

“And?”

“They’re the single lead I have.”

“What lead? They’re not a lead. They’re not even a prayer.”

Paulie told him that, according to the main CIA database at the organization’s headquarters building in Langley, Virginia,
he was the one person alive who’d worked with Peter Walters on that hit. “That makes you the only one who might be able to
tell me whether anyone closely connected to the Fal angas actually knew that my father shot them.”

“How would that help you?”

“I’m hoping it might at least give me an idea of who would want to kill my father.”

“You mean a deferred act of vengeance, eighteen years after the fact?”

“I’m not up to the eighteen years yet. That’s the second step. Right now I just want to find out who might have known my father
was the shooter.”

“Know what I think?” Meister said. “You’re chasing your ass around an empty latrine.”

Paulie was silent. A trapped fly buzzed between the dirty gray curtains and a window.

“Where did you come from this morning?” asked Meister.

“Positano.”

“You came seven hundred miles for
this?”

William Meister sank back into his chair, lost in memory.

“Listen,” he said. “One other guy knew about your father shoot ng the Falangas. He was your dad’s private mole inside the
Falangas’ crowd. That’s how we knew where to hit them.”

“Cortlandt didn’t know about him?”

“No one knew. Not even the two other agents in our group. Your father told me only near the end, in case something went wrong
and he was killed.”

“Who was the mole?”

“A young Italian college student.” Meister stared off at a small mound of dust-covered books. “Your father said the kid needed
tuition money.”

“What was his name? What college?”

“You think I remember after eighteen years?”

Pushing himself up out of his chair, the ex-agent groped for his walker and then lurched between stacks of books until he
reached a pile in a corner of the room. Rummaging through it, he pulled out a couple of dog-eared notebooks and brought them
back to his chair.

“My memoirs,” he said dryly, thumbing through clusters of smudged and yellowed pages.

Paulie watched. When Meister rubbed his face, his flesh shifted like pudding. Here and there he paused to silently read a
passage, shake his head in either wonder or disgust, and move on.

At last he straightened in his chair, licked his lips, and looked at Paulie with rheumy eyes.

“Anthony Pinto,” he said. “That was his name. Eighteen years ago he was a student at Catholic University in Milan.”

Almost the entire route from Zurich to Milan followed good superhighways, and Paulie reached the urban sprawl of the Universita
Cattolica on the Via Ianzone in under two hours.

He showed a dark-haired young woman at the office of the registrar the false badge and identification of a Lieutenant Guido
Ferlandina of the
carabinieri
.

“I’d like to see the file on one of your former students,” he told the clerk. “His name is Anthony Pinto and he was at the
university about eighteen years ago.”

Moments later the clerk brought a folder to an empty desk and left Paulie to go through it alone.

A photograph showed a slender, fair-haired young man with intense eyes and a forced smile. His grades were excellent.
His home address had been in Padua. Later records revealed his having received medical training at the University of Bologna,
along with further study in general and thoracic surgery. The most recent address listed for him was in Rome, where he was
chief of thoracic surgery at Saint Peter’s Hospital.

Paulie drove directly to the Milan Airport, returned his rental car, and boarded the 3:30
P.M.
flight to Rome five minutes before its scheduled departure time.

He caught up with Anthony Pinto as he was leaving the hospital doctors’ lounge.

“Dr. Pinto?”

The surgeon stopped and looked at Paulie. Time had taken much of his once fair hair and all of the forced smile he had worn
in his college photograph.

“And you?” he said.

“Paul Walters.”

Pinto frowned. “The artist?”

“Yes. Also the son of Peggy and Peter Walters.”

“I read about your parents,” said Pinto. “My sympathy. What can I do for you?”

“Is there someplace we can talk?”

The doctor hesitated. A vein pulsed in his temple.

“It won’t take very long and it’s important,” said Paulie.

“My office is just down the corridor.”

They walked through several busy anterooms before the surgeon closed a final door and settled behind his desk. Paulie sat
down facing him. He suddenly felt tired and edgy. Chafing, he began without a preamble.

“Do you have any idea who might have shot my mother and father, Dr. Pinto?”

Pinto’s eyebrows rose. “Why would you ask me a question like that?”

Paulie took out the two pictures of the Falangas’ final moments and handed them across the desk. “Because I found these in
my father’s safe after he and my mother were killed.”

Pinto studied the pictures. “What do these have to do with me?”

“Do you really want to do this the hard way?”

The doctor remained silent.

“All right,” said Paulie. “Eighteen years ago you were working undercover for my father. During this time, you set up Angelo
and Patty Falanga for a CIA operation that ended with my father shooting them both just seconds after these pictures were
snapped.”

He paused. “Now do you want to waste more time, or do we move ahead?”

Pinto looked away from Paulie and out a window.

“Whom did you tell that my father shot the Falangas?”

“I never told anyone.”

“You’re lying,” said Paulie. “You did tell someone. Whoever you told killed my parents.”

Paulie waited for some reaction to his bluff.

“Unless,” he added, “I’m wrong and you did the shooting yourself.

“I want a name from you, Dr. Pinto,” Paulie continued. “If I don’t get it before I leave this office, I’m going to tell those
who still revere the memory of Patty and Angelo Falanga that you were the Judas who sold them out to the CIA.”

Pinto’s lips worked dryly. “You wouldn’t do that.”

“Why wouldn’t I?”

“Because you know I’d be dead in two days.”

“So?”

“For God’s sake! You’re an artist, not an assassin.”

“That was before my parents were murdered.”

“I swear I wasn’t to blame.”

“Then who was?”

“There’s no way I can know for sure. I wasn’t there. But I did tell one man that your father shot the Falangas.”

“What’s his name?”

“When I knew him he called himself Klaus Logefeld. I don’t know what name he’s using now.”

“German?”

Pinto nodded tiredly. He seemed to have aged a decade in minutes.

“What was he?”

“Everything from a terrorist to a savior of the world. You name it.”

“Is he here in Rome?”

“He said he was.”

“What did he ask you for?”

“The shooter who took out the Falangas.”

“How did he know you knew that?”

“He never told me. But he’s always had all sorts of lines out.

“Did he know you sold out the Falangas?”

“Christ, no! I wouldn’t be here if he knew that. He idolized them.”

“What made you hand him my father as their killer?”

“Klaus knows enough about my early student years to end my career tomorrow.” The surgeon brought the fingers of both hands
together. They were shaking. “I couldn’t stand up to that. I’ve worked too hard to throw it all away.”

“So you threw away my mother and father instead?”

“It wasn’t like that. I was sick over it. I never expected them :o be shot. Certainly not your mother. Please understand.
I had no choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“None that I could live with.”

Paulie could think of no argument against that.

“Where does this Klaus Logefeld live?” he asked.

“About a twenty-minute drive from here. Not far off the Via della Lungara.” Pinto hesitated. “At least that was the address
he gave me.”

“Then you’re going to drive me there right now.”

The parking lot was directly in back of the hospital.

Paulie watched Pinto get behind the wheel of his car, then he slid into the seat beside him.

The doctor’s nervousness had increased. His movements were hesitant, shaky, and the keys jangled in his hand as he sought
the ignition. Then the keys slipped from his fingers entirely, and he bent and groped for them on the floor under his seat.

“Easy,” said Paulie. “Just do as I tell you and you’ll be all right.”

The surgeon lifted his hand from the floor. Paulie saw the automatic a split second before he heard a muffled shot. He felt
a slight burning across his forehead.

He grabbed the barrel just as a second shot took him in the arm.

One more and I’m dead
, he thought. Paulie struggled to turn the barrel in Pinto’s strong hand.

Finally Paulie wrenched the automatic around and heard the soft sound of a shot smothered between their chests.

Pinto went limp against the driver’s door. Blood stained his chest where his jacket was open. His eyes stared.

All I’m left with is a German name
, thought Paulie, who had little doubt that even this would turn out to be false.

An ambulance siren drew him out of his reverie. He looked around the parking lot. No one was in sight, and the three muffled
shots inside the car had apparently gone unnoticed. He felt light-headed and curiously without pain. Examining his forehead
in the rearview mirror, he saw a shallow, angled gash above his right eye slowly oozing blood. Lucky. Lucky, too, with the
wound in his arm. The bullet had passed through only flesh, and he was able to stanch the bleeding with a handkerchief.

Moments later he left Dr. Anthony Pinto alone in his car, dead seemingly by his own hand, his finger still on the trigger.
Paulie walked fifty yards to his third Hertz rental of a very long day, and drove out of the parking lot.

Expecting nothing, he stopped at a public phone, asked the operator if there was a Rome listing for a Klaus Logefeld, and
got just what he expected.

Paulie drove directly to a company safe apartment on the Via Boncompagni and took care of his wounds. He woke in a fever during
the night, his mind a swirling montage of Kate Dinneson’s face and an anonymous, perhaps even nonexistent German called Klaus
Logefeld.

T
HE PRESIDENT WAS ALONE
as Tommy Cortlandt entered the Oval Office, a fact that was in itself significant.

The CIA director could recall only three other times that he hac been summoned to the White House for a private audience.
Each time had turned out to be special, although never a good sort of special. Once it had come near to being a full-blown
disaster. Even now, Cortlandt could feel its remembered weight pressing his chest as he crossed the room.

“It’s good to see you, Tommy.”

James Dunster rose and came out from behind his desk to shake Cortlandt’s hand. The president was a tall string bean of a
man, homely and physically awkward enough to be attractive in a distinctly Lincolnesque way. Cartoonists usually had a field
day portraying him in shawls and stovepipe hats, while the more Freudian of his image makers were certain that his resemblance
to the Great Emancipator had gotten him elected in the first place.

“Good to see you, too, Mr. President.”

Cortlandt searched Dunster’s bony face for possible portents, but found nothing.

‘What’s happening, sir?”

“No more than our normal crises, so you can stop looking so worried.” The president’s voice was soft as a southerner’s drawl,
but there was no mistaking its touch of New England. “I just need your ear and possible help on something.”

He motioned the CIA director into a chair and settled
his own length into a facing leather couch. He poured a couple of black coffees from an ever-present thermos and handed a
cup to Cortlandt.

“I had a call from German chancellor Eisner a few hours ago,” said the president. “It was routine. Nothing momentous. He happened
to mention the conference he’s hosting at Wannsee on September 13, and I was struck by something he said.”

Dunster paused for a sip of coffee.

“Eisner said, ‘This whole conference is going to be a dark and terrible mirror, and I have to wonder how many of us will be
able to peer into it and not shudder.’”

The president paused once more, this time to mull over the words.

“Of course, the chancellor was speaking as a German,” said Dunster. “How could he not? Just thinking about what the Germans
have done in this century is enough to turn you green. But the sad truth is that much of the same horror is going on even
now in at least four African countries, no one is doing anything about it, and there’s plenty of guilt to go around.”