The Man Who Heard Too Much Read online

  “Pity.” Rutledge stood. “Well, let’s get on with it.” He broke into his easy, rhythmic stride while Martin closed the haversack and followed.

  Martin knew they were supposed to be some of the most important men in the country, but he wouldn’t have guessed it by their dress as they milled around the cottage living room drinking cocktails. There were a dozen men present besides him, Billie, and Senator Baxter. They were dressed in jeans, Bermuda shorts, rumpled slacks, and an equal mix of assorted shirts.

  “Circulate with the hors d’oeuvres,” Billie snapped in a low whisper. “Circulate. Offer the tray to everyone in the room, one at a time. Got it?”

  “I think so.” Martin picked up the tray and began to walk from group to group. He stood quietly at the shoulder of talking men until his proffered tray was noticed and the hors d’oeuvres either accepted or waved away.

  The conversation became a kaleidoscope of remarks, and it took him until the second hour of the party to realize that there was a dominant undercurrent theme to what everyone was saying.

  “Baxter’s the man to do it. He’s one of the most respected men in the Senate, with an unblemished military record.”

  “If we don’t do something, there’s going to be a domino fall up the coast of South America that will make what happened in Southeast Asia seem like an American Legion patriotic celebration.”

  “The goddamn bleeding hearts won’t stand for it. They’ll make a stink, have sit-ins, protest marches, and all that goddamn stuff.”

  “Baxter’s the one.”

  Martin returned to the kitchen for another tray of canapes. He knew by sight several of the people he had served in the living room. They watched a great deal of television at the school, and although the nightly news did not stay on long before someone switched the channel in a search for cartoons, he had seen at least four of the guests on national television.

  Slightly awed, he picked up the new tray and went back into the living room.

  They had finished their second day’s run, breakfasted, and now Martin was finishing the cleaning and dishes. Rutledge had left early to make his rounds of several other encampments he had begun to visit regularly. Billie was standing before the front porch practicing as Martin came out for further orders.

  The small man’s arm twisted slightly to the right and the knife slid into his palm and was thrown in a motion so fluid that it seemed continuous.

  “You’re good with that,” Martin said as he watched the knife quiver in the tree, dead center in the target.

  “I practice a lot,” Billie said as he walked to the tree and with difficulty withdrew the knife.

  “You’re the senator’s bodyguard too?”

  “Something like that. Want to see something?”

  Martin nodded. “Yes.”

  “Follow me.” Billie walked through the cottage and into his bedroom. He pulled a large case out of the closet, threw it on the bed, and opened it with near reverence. “Take a look.”

  Martin moved cautiously toward the bed and peered into the interior of the case. Felt slots had been built to the exact dimensions of the housed weapons. “Guns,” he said.

  “Guns are cannons. These are hand weapons.” He lifted a large pistol with a twelve-inch barrel. “This is a .357 magnum with long barrel. The most powerful handgun made, for its accuracy.”

  “Are you as good with those as you are with that knife?”

  Billie laughed. “Hell, no. Can’t hit the goddamn broad side of a brick shit house. That’s why I have this baby.” He carefully lifted a sawed-off shotgun from the case. A harness was wound around the pistol grip and he unraveled it and strapped the weapon to his body. It stretched from under his armpit to his waist.

  “You put your coat over it?” Martin asked.

  “If I need to carry it. Come on, kid, I’ll show you.” He picked up the magnum and a handful of shells from the case and left the room. “Grab a coupla empty cans and bottles from the kitchen … we’re going plinking.”

  They walked over the ridge and down the side, as far away from the main section of the camp as they could get. The spot was obviously familiar to Billie, because he walked straight to it.

  They were in a small cove of trees with a high bank directly in front of them. Billie set the cans and bottles on the ground before the bank and rejoined Martin twenty yards away. He loaded the magnum and handed it to Martin.

  “Come on. It don’t bite. Take it. Just don’t point it my way.”

  Martin took the weapon and was surprised at its weight. “It’s heavy.”

  “Now try and shoot one of those cans or bottles. Go on. Aim … pull the trigger … no! Let me show you how to hold and brace your shooting arm.” He put the revolver in Martin’s right hand and demonstrated how to brace his wrist with the left. “Now, fire.”

  The pistol roared in Martin’s hand. The recoil and jolt startled him and he nearly dropped the weapon.

  “Ya’ didn’t hit anything. What did I tell you?”

  “It sure makes a lot of noise.”

  “Course it does, and that’s about all the good it is. To scare a guy to death. Now watch this.” Again, the fluid motion as the sawed-off shotgun fell from its harness into the small man’s waiting fingers. It fired, and a blotch of dirt, sand and pebbles spewed skyward from around the bottle to the right. The bottle itself disintegrated into a thousand shards. “See. With this I don’t miss.”

  “I see that,” Martin said in awe.

  “The average guy doesn’t know that. Doesn’t know that in the old days the cowboys used to have gunfights by standing ten feet away from each other. Couldn’t hit anything if they were further apart. Handgun’s no damn good at anything more than a dozen feet. Go on, try again. Empty the damn thing.”

  Martin fired and fired again. He didn’t hit anything.

  Billie laughed in glee. “What did I tell you? Now try this.” He handed Martin the shotgun. “Point it in the general direction … like it was an extension of your finger.”

  Martin pointed, fired, and disintegrated the second bottle.

  “You learn, don’tcha?” Billie clapped him on the back.

  Chapter Eleven

  It was enough for one day.

  Ray Heath stood, snapped off the light machine, and depressed the “stop” button on the cassette player. He looked down to see that Martin had fallen into a light sleep. He walked to the window behind the leather chair and gently raised the shade.

  What manner of men were they dealing with? What powers were they unleashing? He was convinced that the answer to recent events lay with what had befallen Martin at Camp Mohawk. The hypnotherapy was bringing them closer and eventually it would be revealed … but at what further danger to all of them?

  Martin stirred and his eyes opened. “I fell asleep, huh?”

  “Do you remember what you told me … about your first days at the camp?”

  “Yes. It’s like a dream. A very clear dream.”

  Ray gave him a clap on the back. “And it’s made you hungry. Let’s eat.”

  “Fine with me.”

  They walked in single file through the narrow hallway and downstairs to the kitchen. “Did you shoot every day with that man? The one called Billie?”

  “Every afternoon. I had the feeling he was bored and wanted to teach someone. I got pretty good toward the end.”

  Ray shook his head. Even his own frame of reference in past studies of abnormal psychology hadn’t included psychopathic men who spent hours a day throwing knives at trees and firing shotguns at bottles … men who diligently honed these skills and then for obscure reasons imparted them to a supposedly retarded man who would have no functional use for them.

  Sara had made a heaping platter of bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches and was now pouring large goblets of ice cold milk. She smiled at them as they entered the kitchen. “Heard you coming. What happened?”

  “It’s on the machine,” Ray answered.

  “I’ll
eat mine upstairs.” She hurriedly whisked a sandwich onto a paper plate and scurried up the narrow stairs.

  “Where’s she going?” Martin asked through a mouthful of sandwich.

  “To listen to the session on the recorder.”

  Martin nodded. “I guess she should know everything.”

  Althea stood before the mirror in the bathroom of her room at the Leatherstocking Inn and examined the tire iron bruise on her right cheekbone. It hadn’t been so obvious the first day, but now had spread until nearly the whole side of her face was discolored.

  She snorted and began to apply makeup.

  The soft knock at the door annoyed her. “Who is it?” she snapped irritably.

  “Bamburg.”

  “Oh, God,” she muttered aloud, “King Creep is here.” She strode to the door, opened it quickly, beckoned him inside, and slammed it after he entered. “He sent you?”

  “No, I’m on a bird-watching trip.” Billie threw a small valise on the bed.

  “You’re not moving in with me, buster.”

  “That’s the weapon and money you wanted. Knock it off, honey bear. I wouldn’t touch you with an eleven-foot pole.”

  She flipped open the bag, quickly rifled through a stack of currency, and then picked up a .38 revolver and examined it carefully. “It seems in order.”

  “What happened to your face, honey bear?”

  “None of your fucking business.”

  “Touchy, aren’t we?”

  “I ran into a door.”

  “Opened by Fowler by any chance?”

  “Fowler, Fowler, Fowler! I’m so goddamn sick of that bastard! Why in hell didn’t Rutledge tell me about him?”

  “He did.”

  “He’s supposed to be a retard.”

  “He’s an idiot savant, at least so the boss says.”

  “A what?”

  “A person of below normal intelligence who can remember long strings of unrelated facts or numbers. Which, by the way, is why he’s so dangerous to us.”

  Althea felt the throbbing side of her face. “He also knows how to throw things.”

  Billie sat in a chair and lounged back. “So, do you have any leads?”

  “Of course I have leads.”

  He gave her a tight smile. “Let’s not be bitchy, honey bear.”

  “Why did Rutledge send you?”

  “Because I’m the best.”

  “You also have known connections with the senator, whereas I don’t.”

  “The problem is too important to him, and you haven’t succeeded.”

  “It was accidental. He should have been taken out on two occasions.”

  Billie folded his arms. “But he wasn’t, doll face. This time we go ahead without fancy stuff. No chains, no cars off roads—we take him and the woman out, cleanly and simply.”

  “Be my guest. It will be interesting to observe an expert in action.”

  “My, my. We are offended, aren’t we?”

  “You’re damn right I am, Billie. Rutledge knows I can’t stand you, and I resent his sending you up here.”

  “Where is Fowler?” The bantering tone had completely left the little man’s voice.

  Althea sighed. “Let me fill you in. In looking for Fowler, I went out to the training school under an assumed name. The chief psychologist out there, Ray Heath, somehow made me. It had to be him because he was the only one who knew what motel I was staying in. A few hours after my visit with Heath, Fowler and the woman arrive at the motel. You know what happened there. It would seem that the connection between Heath and Fowler is obvious. It becomes even more obvious when I learned that Heath has taken an unexpected vacation.”

  “Ergo, the three of them are together?” Bamburg asked.

  “Ergo, you are so right.”

  “And on their way to California?”

  “And in a house five miles from here.”

  Billie glanced at his watch. “We’ll need a safe car, and I never go into a strange place without looking it over first. Details tomorrow and we take them tomorrow night.”

  Althea felt her bruised face again. “It can’t be too soon for me.”

  For the first time in twenty-two years Martin Fowler cried.

  He was sitting Indian fashion in the center of Ray Heath’s living room with a glass of red wine on the floor before him. The booming sounds of the stereo’s strategically placed speakers roiled sound around him. The chorus rose to a crescendo backed by the full symphony orchestra and then the final movement was over.

  He was stunned and it took a few moments for his sense of the present to return. He looked over at Ray and Sara sitting on the couch. He saw they were looking at him.

  “I never knew anything could be so beautiful,” he said in a husky voice that did not sound like his own.

  “Some people think it’s the most beautiful piece of music ever composed,” Sara said.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. It’s called the Choral Symphony because the composer felt that only by adding the human voice could he reach the heights and achieve the effects he wanted.”

  “I never knew such things existed,” Martin said. There was a faraway poignant tone to his voice as if he were voicing the loss of two decades.

  Ray stood and walked over to the amplifier to switch off the machine. “We have a lot of ground to cover tomorrow, Martin. Let’s hit the sack.”

  Martin stood in the bathroom doorway, toothbrush in hand, and watched them come up the stairs arm in arm. They stopped at the entrance to Ray’s bedroom. Ray smiled at him and Sara blew a kiss. They went into the room and closed the door behind them.

  He hung the toothbrush in the rack and went into the spare bedroom. He stripped down to his shorts, hung his clothes in the empty closet, opened the window, and stood looking over the dark mountains. A cool northerly breeze swept over him and he shivered.

  Ray had said the last movement of that symphony was based on a poem called “Ode to Joy.” He would see if he could find a copy tomorrow in one of the many books in the house. He thought about the music a moment and then climbed on the cot and pulled a quilt up to his chin.

  Sara’s low moan made him sit bolt upright. His muscles tensed as he prepared to fling himself against the door.

  She moaned again and then he heard her voice through the thin walls. “Oh, God, Ray.”

  Martin lay face down on the cot as his fingers clenched the sidebars. He pushed his face as deeply into the pillow as he could.

  The clicking disc made a metronomelike sound as it continued its endless passage to and fro before the light.

  Ray noticed with satisfaction that the prior conditioning had worked—Martin went into the trance faster than the day before, and it seemed to be of a deeper nature. The deep trance would give him a greater control and allow him to speed up the process and reach the important events that occurred at Camp Mohawk.…

  Martin’s work fell into the rhythm of the day’s events at the camp: obtain wood near dawn, the six-mile run with the senator, washup, cleanup, target practice with Billie, and then preparation for lunch. Each night there were meetings with important people at the isolated cabin.

  Rutledge Galation Baxter dominated the proceedings. He usually stood before the fireplace, his tanned face and well-muscled body seemed to exude confidence and assurance.

  He spoke with the sonorous tones of a man with a mission. “We are going to lose,” he said. “The Southern Hemisphere will fall, and communism will creep up the continent until we are surrounded and then engulfed.”

  The men, listening intently around him, would murmur assent. They were the careful culls from dozens of verbal feelers and conversations.

  “It is imperative that we have a legal fulcrum upon which to base our counterattack against these forces,” Rutledge would continue. “Operation Barbados and the Baxter Amendment are the mechanisms through which we shall attain our goals.”

 
Heads shook in agreement, thoughtful men puffed pipes with greater fervor. He had them and he knew it.

  “Here is what I propose,” Rutledge said.

  It was Martin’s task to see that each of the guests was served prior to Rutledge’s presentation. Then he would stand respectfully at the rear of the long living room and listen as the senator talked.

  Billie Bamburg parked the rented car on a road that ran parallel to Ray Heath’s house, a half-mile distant. He pulled off onto a logging road, checked to make sure the car was obscured from the highway, and gathered his equipment.

  He wore an army camouflage suit, jump boots, a bush hat that dangled down over one side of his face, and carried day and night binoculars. His only weapon was the knife strapped under his sleeve on his forearm.

  He stood by the car and took a compass reading, snapped shut the lid on the instrument, and walked into the woods. He would take a position well back from the Heath house, with good cover, but excellent sight lines to the front and side yards of the house.

  A cloud of black flies discovered him and hovered near his face and neck. He swatted at them and pulled the brim of his cap lower over his head. Occasionally he would stop to take another compass reading, and then walk on.

  Today and tonight would be surveillance of the house—the strike would be made near dawn.

  He was vaguely fond of Martin Fowler. The weeks at Camp Mohawk had created a tenuous bond between the two men, but that would not deter him. He would make the hit in the same efficient manner that he had taken out Dung Thou.

  Dung had somehow sensed his presence that night, and had abruptly turned as the piano wire garrote had encircled his neck. Their eyes had met, inches apart, and recognition had briefly flickered in the man’s face until Billie had yanked the wire taut and turned the look into terror.

  It would be the same, but not the same. They were all different and that’s what generated the excitement.

  He could see the house in the distance and found a spot under a willow tree with brush cover to the side. He lay prone on the ground and took out the binoculars: It would be a long day, but he was a patient man.