The Buck Passes Flynn Page 2

  “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.”

  4

  “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.”

  “What about institutions, Frank?”

  “What institutions?”

  “Foundations. The mob. Groups that have that kind of money.”

  “Usually groups have at least one sane person somewhere.”

  “Take N.N., for example,” said N.N. Zero. “Hot down there in Texas?”

  “There’s a hot wind blowing, and me dressed in t
he tweeds.”

  “Keep in touch with Central, Frank.”

  Randy, one of Flynn’s fifteen-year-old twin sons, answered the phone at the house in Winthrop.

  Flynn could tell the voices of his twin sons apart.

  “Randy, I have a puzzle for you.”

  “Yes, Da?”

  “What could depopulate a town in Texas, cause the people of a resort town in Massachusetts to go berserk and act against their own best interests, and render an important Intelligence department at the Pentagon completely useless?”

  “A skunk?”

  “Guess again.”

  “Pollution.”

  “What kind of pollution?”

  “Something in the air? A gas?”

  “Guess again.”

  “Poison. A poisonous gas?”

  “Keep working on it. Tell your mother I’ll be away for a while. I’ll call in whenever I can. If there’s an emergency, she should call Pittsburgh.”

  5

  “WOULD you be the Reverend Sandy Fraiman, by the least chance?”

  Even in the wind, Flynn was sweating on the broken front porch of the pitted white house next to the church.

  “Yes,” said the man through the screen door. His eyes were badly bloodshot.

  “I’m someone named Flynn. Sent down here to ask you what happened to this town.”

  The man pushed the screen door open.

  “I’m glad to see anyone,” he said.

  Flynn followed him into the barely furnished, rugless living room. The drawn Venetian blinds were clattering against the window frames.

  Reverend Sandy Fraiman was in his late thirties. He was dressed in a torn T-shirt and new-looking jeans and his feet were bare. His hair and his eyes were black as an ambassador’s shoes.

  “Tell me,” said Flynn. “Is the name Sandy, in your case, a diminutive for the proper name Alexander?”

  “No. Why should it be?”

  “You mean Sandy was the name given you at birth?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well,” said Flynn, “I hope you know your parents had trouble with their eyes. Sandy you’re not.”

  Before Flynn’s eyes were adjusted to the light in the dark house, he thought he saw the minister slide a glass under a chair with his toe.

  The minister sat in the chair.

  “Sit down, Mister Whoever-you-are.”

  “Flynn,” said Flynn.

  “It’s just this side of perdition, living in an empty town. The Lord be praised. The things He sends to try us.”

  Flynn lowered himself onto the uncomfortable wooden-framed divan.

  “I’ll give an amen to that, I will.”

  Ada, Texas, was empty.

  On the long drive from Austin in his rented Plymouth, Flynn had felt the sense of space keenly. Thirty miles from Houston he realized a yellow Fiat convertible was behind him, maintaining exactly his speed, not catching up to him, not falling behind. Twenty miles farther, the car turned off on a ranch road. Through his rearview mirror, Flynn watched its dust rise. For the rest of the way he had nothing to watch but the horizon turning with incredible slowness, the highway remaining as unchanging as a spinster.

  Miles from the town of Ada, Flynn had seen evidences of abandonment. Tractors stood out in the open. Front doors and even some barn doors had been left open, blowing in the wind. Cattle lay, their bellies bloated, dead in the scrub pastures and along the road.

  Ada’s main street (there was only one street), was shut up. The window of the hardware store was cracked and the shades of the grocery store were drawn. The feed store looked locked.

  At best, Ada, Texas, had been a boring town.

  “The Lord has not abandoned me,” said the Reverend Fraiman. “That I know.”

  “He’s left you crying in the wilderness, though.”

  “The Lord is within every person. In every one of us.”

  Flynn scratched his head. “Then a lot of the Lord just left town.”

  Although there were only two of them in this abandoned corner of the world, the Reverend Fraiman raised his chin and spoke to the back of the small room. “No matter how much the messenger of the Lord raises up his people, he must not raise them up in their own eyes. For the Lord is God and He does not love the pride of arrogance. Nor may the messenger, however much he loves his own people, raise them up even in his own eyes. For the Lord is his God and not even God’s most wonderful creature, man, may be allowed to obscure the messenger’s vision.”

  A particularly strong wind rattled the Venetian blinds.

  “Reverend Fraiman, if you could tell me what happened here, to the people of this town …?”

  “Satan came to them in the night, every man, woman, and child of them, and whispered in their hearts that despite all the manifestations of the Lord they had witnessed on this earth, they were his children, the children of Satan, and he filled them with madness, and he stole their souls away.”

  “The devil took them?”

  “As the Lord said …”

  The reverend’s chin remained high, but there were tears in his eyes. He swallowed.

  “I’m sure you’re right, Reverend Fraiman,” Flynn said. “In a way. Sure, the devil took them. And your wife … may I ask after her?”

  “No, no.” There was alarm in the reverend’s eyes. “She just drove into Bixby. She has to drive all the way into Bixby just to get the groceries.”

  “I see.” Flynn tried again to make himself comfortable on the broken couch. “I’m sure the people in such a wee town as this come to mean the world to each other.”

  “Sure.”

  “Ach, sure, I know,” said Flynn. “They grow up together, love each other, hate each other, marry each other, have babies, know well each other’s surprising sins, each other’s surprising nobilities.”

  “What did you say your name is?”

  “Flynn.”

  “You’re not from around here.”

  “No,” said Flynn. “I’m not. I’m not from anywhere in Texas.”

  “You like this part of the world?”

  “There’s a lot of it,” admitted Flynn.

  “Are you Christian?”

  “Well,” said Flynn, “I’m workin’ at it. Isn’t that the most that can be asked of any man, whatever the question is?”

  “Have you the gift of tongues?” asked the minister.

  “No, sir,” answered Flynn. “Only the gift of gab.”

  “Will you pray with me?”

  The reverend’s bloodshot eyes stared at Flynn.

  “Good Lord, man, what do you think I’m doin’?”

  “On our knees, Mister Flynn, we shall join hands and raise our voices in praise of the Lord.”

  “I’ll do my own prayin’,” said Flynn, “on my own time.”

  “Are you saying you will not pray with me?”

  “I’m on duty. I’m here, you see, to inquire why the people of this town ran off between a Saturday and a Thursday. Now if you’d only speak to that?”

  “Mysterious are the ways of the Lord.”

  “Reverend Fraiman, if I wanted to inquire into the ways of the Lord, I could have stayed home with my family.” Flynn’s tweed trousers were sticking to him in the heat. “Now on that Thursday you called the F.B.I., it wasn’t to ask them to praise the Lord with you, although I’m sure a dose of the old ‘Lead, Kindly Light’ would do them no harm, either. I’d be pleased if you’d tell me what you told them, in the greatest detail of which you are capable.”

  “Aren’t you from the F.B.I.?”

  “The F.B.I.,” sighed Flynn, “wrote out a report of this incident and sent it on to us.”

  “Then why do I need to go through it again?”

  “What?” said Flynn. “Have you never repeated yourself in your life? Then, for all that, you’ve done damned little what-you-call prayin’.” Flynn leaned forward and said more gently, “You may take it, Reverend Fraiman, that the F.B.I. do indeed have the gift of tongues. Their
every utterance is magnificent in its power, but mysterious to us poor mortals who cannot keep up with their codes. I’m sure the Lord understands them, but the rest of us are left on our knees, gaping at the wonder of it all. Therefore, if you wouldn’t mind giving me the word, I suspect all Israel will hum your praises.”

  “You’re not an ignorant man, Flynn.”

  “Even at this very moment,” said Flynn, sitting back and raising his hand to the ceiling, “I pursue knowledge. Now: about three months ago, you called the F.B.I. office in Austin. Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Had you ever called an F.B.I. office before in your life?”

  “No.”

  “Had you ever met the F.B.I. agent in Austin?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever called the police for any reason whatsoever before in your life?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “When?”

  “A year ago. A year and a half ago.”

  Flynn waited for him to explain.

  “Coming home late one night. From a Prayer Day in Austin. I found a couple of dozen kids on the highway. Cars, pickup trucks. I stopped. I realized they were arranging drag races, or whatever. I asked them to stop. Even when I identified myself, they ignored me. This was outside Bixby. There were no Ada kids there. Some were drinking beer, and I saw a whiskey bottle. I stopped at a ranch nearby and called the police. The police in Bixby. I was afraid someone might get hurt.”

  Flynn said, “You’re not a man to call the police every time there’s a shadow on the road.”

  “No,” said the minister. “I’m not. There is a higher law….”

  “Then calling the F.B.I. was not a small matter to you….”

  “My wife and I discussed what I should do many times before I did anything. Before I called Austin. We prayed over it.”

  “All right now, Reverend: why did you call the F.B.I.?”

  “The sheriff was gone, too. He left Tuesday. We saw him leave.”

  “Were you thinking a crime had been committed?”

  “A crime?”

  “People are prone to call the police or the F.B.I. when they think a crime has been committed.”