Rustic Roswell slipped away and scrubby desolation took over, the two-lane ribbon of well-worn concrete stretching endlessly ahead. In the open-air jeep, jostling along, I held on to my hat, figuratively and literally. I didn’t ask any questions, because getting my ass hauled out to the former Roswell Army Air Field was about the only way I might hope to actually talk to Colonel William H. Blanchard. And the two white-helmeted MPs, both of whom sat in front, had nothing to say to each other, let alone me.
Five minutes outside of town, the base was signaled by a sign with the words WALKER AFB in a proud deco mushroom cloud that rose above its horizontal base, smaller letters spelling OUT HOME OF just below, with 509TH BOMB GROUP and 1ST AIR TRANS UNIT boldly emblazoned left and right, respectively. The field had been renamed after the Air Force had broken off from the Army into its own entity, something which Jim Forrestal had initially opposed, incidentally.
Then through heat shimmer, like a desert mirage, the sprawl of the air base revealed itself: first the tower, then hangars, one- and two- and three-story barracks and other buildings, fenced-off areas, far-flung tarmacs where planes were taxiing, taking off and landing, even green landscaped grounds complete with trees. The main gate wasn’t terribly impressive, however, sitting like a brick tollbooth in a vast, unfenced paved area, the words WALKER AIR FORCE BASE curving above, black letters on white. For all the talk of security, Walker seemed fairly accessible; I mean, hell-they let me in, without a pass, merely on the word of the two armed MPs who’d kidnapped me.
We pulled up to a two-story white clapboard building and, over the rumble of airplane engines and churning propellers, I was told to follow the colored MP while the white one trailed behind me. We trooped through a bustling bullpen where aides and secretaries were at work at desks, typewriters clattering, new notices getting pinned up on bulletin boards while old ones came down, maps taking up most of the wall space. At a modest glass-and-wood walled-off office, the MP in the lead knocked at a glass-and-wood door stenciled COLONEL W. BLANCHARD.
Pearson’s file had filled me in a little on Blanchard-nick-name “Butch”-who had a reputation as a “swashbuckling” pilot, rumored to have once returned from a Mexican jaunt in a trainer jet so loaded down with whiskey, the plane crashed to a fiery stop; legend had it he’d fled the scene, then returned to indignantly demand the mysterious pilot be tracked down and court-martialed. Blanchard had been next in line to drop “Fat Man” on Hiroshima, but history had seemed to pass him by-unless, of course, there was something to these flying saucer stories I’d been hearing all day.
Blanchard-husky, dark-haired, dashingly handsome, the “Old Man” as Haut had referred to him-was barely past thirty; he looked up from a desk cluttered with work, framed family photos, humidor, pipe rack and trio of telephones. He waved the MP inside.
“Leave Mr. Heller with me, Sergeant,” Blanchard said, in a crisp baritone, “and don’t wait around.”
“Yes, sir,” the colored MP said, and held the door open, nodding curtly for me to enter.
I did. Blanchard gave me half a smile, didn’t rise, gesturing to the waiting hardwood chair across from him. I sat, just as the MP was shutting, almost slamming, the door; it startled me, but I’m sure my reaction was no more obvious than Shemp Howard’s would have been.
The colonel had the casual look of a man who’d seen combat and didn’t suffer bullshit-no tie, sleeves rolled up, but with the authoritative touch of the pipe he was smoking. On the wall behind him were framed photos from the war, Blanchard posing with his plane, with his crew, at the front of a group shot of the 509th; and centrally displayed was an elaborate, and impressive, collection of medals. Also on exhibit, just behind him, was a Japanese ceremonial sword, sitting on a pedestal atop a low-slung bookcase. To his right stood an American flag.
Blanchard said, “Welcome to Walker, Mr. Heller.”
“Thanks for inviting me. How is it you know my name?”
Leaning back, he took a couple of puffs at the pipe, then said, “I know a lot about you, Mr. Heller-your war record, including your Silver Star. Honor to have you in my office.”
“That’s kind of you, Colonel. But why am I in your office?”
Now he sat forward. “I understand you’ve been asking questions around town, about that …” He chuckled. “… flying saucer flap we had around here, while back.”
“It didn’t take you long to find that out,” I said. “I’ve only been in town since this morning.”
“Well, we pride ourselves on our intelligence here at Walker.”
“You talking smarts, Colonel, or spies?”
“Both.” Blanchard grinned a winning grin; he had the look of the most popular guy at the frat house. “If you have any questions about that incident, perhaps I can answer them for you.”
I blinked a couple times. “You’re willing to be interviewed?”
He gestured expansively with pipe in hand. “Certainly. By the way, who is this interview for, Mr. Heller? My understanding is you’re working for a well-known journalist.”
“I’ve been asked to keep his name confidential.”
Half a grin, now. “Why, does he have a bad reputation?”
“Let’s just say he has a reputation, Colonel. You, uh, mind if I take notes?”
“No, no … not at all.” His pipe had gone out; he used a kitchen match to get it going again-the smoke was fragrant, sweet. Maybe too sweet-like Blanchard’s attitude.
Notepad out, pen ready, I asked, “What can you tell me about the incident, Colonel?”
“A local rancher found some debris out on a pasture; with all this saucer hoopla in the air, I’m afraid we jumped the gun.” Blanchard shrugged gently, smiled the same way. “Turns out it was just a weather balloon, trailing a Rawin radar target.”
“Who authorized the press release?”
“I did.”
“On whose authority, Colonel?”
“Mine.”
“… I guess you didn’t anticipate the public’s reaction.”
He laughed through teeth that clenched the pipe. “I sure as hell didn’t. Phones were bombarded; I couldn’t even get an open line to make my own outgoing calls.”
I kept my tone light as I asked, “Were you reprimanded, Colonel, for ‘jumping the gun’ with that press release?”
The grin disappeared. “No. It wasn’t a big deal, Mr. Heller. We all had a good laugh.”
“Who, you and General Ramey? Did Major Marcel find it funny? He was the one who looked like a sap.”
“We all thought it was funny,” he said tightly. “Is there anything else, Mr. Heller?”
“What about accusations of the military threatening citizens into silence? Cordoning off the Brazel place? Calling the local mortician, asking for small caskets?”
Blanchard leaned back, took a long draw on the pipe, released a cloud of smoke. “Mr. Heller, Roswell’s a small town, and this base has a big responsibility. Sometimes the simple people of a farm community can make something out of nothing.”
“Mountain out of a molehill?”
“Exactly. This is ancient country, a land of myth, of superstition … add to that the kind of gossip that makes any small town go ’round, and you can come up with some really wild tall tales.”
I beamed at him, sitting forward. “Well, then, if you don’t mind … I’ll get back to town and see if I can find some more whoppers for this article. I mean, my boss is trying to do something fun, after all, about the saucer fad.”
The handsome face went blank; the pipe was in his teeth, but he wasn’t drawing on it. “The Air Force would appreciate it if you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what? Stick around, or give my boss the makings of a story?”
“Either. Both.”
“If there’s nothing to this, Colonel, what’s the harm of me staying around, and seeking out some more tall tales?”
Blanchard rose slowly, placed his pipe in an ashtray, and quite dramatically rested both his palms on the desk and leaned across, almost whispering, “You have a distinguished war record, Mr. Heller. You served your country faithfully and well. I’m asking you, as one patriot to another, to leave this be. To pack your bag and leave the Roswell area.”
There’s a stage out of town at noon….
I shook my head, grinned at him-not as winning a grin as his, I’m sure, but it was all I had. “First of all, Colonel, my war record isn’t all that distinguished-not unless you consider a Section Eight something worth framing and putting on the wall. Second, I get real nervous when people talk patriotism. It’s like when somebody says they expect you to do the ‘Christian’ thing.”
Blanchard stood erect. “That was not a threat, Mr. Heller. This was an embarrassing incident, and we’d prefer not to have it dredged up again.”
“Even if you could have another good laugh over it?”
He sighed, shook his head, wearily. “I had hoped you’d cooperate.”
“You mean, go home, and quash this story?”
“Yes.” He pointed at me with the pipe stem, emphasizing certain words. “Let me say off the record … hypothetically … that if the Air Force were presenting a story to the public that did not represent the true facts, in this or any instance, there would be a good reason for it. Having to do with security considerations, and the public good. And I would hope a loyal American would respect the wishes of his government. Loose lips, as we used to say, sink ships.”
“Including flying saucers?”
“Mr. Heller, you disappoint me.”
I leaned back in my chair and folded my arms. “Say, Butch-did they ever find that pilot who crashed that plane loaded down with whiskey?”
Blanchard blanched. “How did you …”
“I pride myself on my intelligence, too, Colonel.” I stood. “Can you have somebody give me a lift back to Roswell? Or maybe have your men take me out in the desert and shoot me?”
“I don’t find you very amusing, Mr. Heller.”
“Sorry-I’m fresh out of weather balloons.”
Blanchard picked a receiver off one of his phones, said, “Send Kaufmann over here.” Then he hung up, and said, “No MPs, Mr. Heller-a civilian will take you back to town. Now, would you mind stepping out of my office? Step outside the building, in fact. I think I’ve seen quite enough of you.”
The colonel kept his word: no MPs waited to accompany me off the base. My driver was a rather grizzled-looking, brown-haired, square-headed, broad-shouldered civilian in his thirties, in a short-sleeved plaid shirt and chinos. He’d already been behind the wheel, waiting outside, when I’d climbed in the front seat; and we were outside the gate and tooling toward town before he took one blunt-fingered hand off the wheel to offer it in a handshake.
“Frank Kaufmann,” he said, in a low-pitched, slightly graveled voice.
His handshake was firm. My straw fedora was at my feet; traveling in the open-air jeep was making my hair stand up, if what I’d been hearing today hadn’t already done that.
“Nate Heller,” I said, adjusting my sunglasses.
Kaufmann glanced over at me, raising eyebrows that were as brown and wild as the brush streaking by us; his eyes were a light, clear brown and he had a sly smile going.
“Jesse Marcel’s friend,” he said.
“Now how do you know that?”
There seemed to be a twinkle in those amber eyes. “Maybe it’s ’cause I’m in charge of security out at the base.”
“A civilian in charge of security?”
He shrugged, still smiling, a private smile. “Well, I wasn’t always a civilian. Used to be a master sergeant. During the war I was the NCOIC under General Scanlon.”
Noncommissioned officer in charge.
“You must’ve had a pretty high clearance,” I said, “considering the 509th was the only air squadron flying atomic bombs.”
“I knew what I was doin’. When I left the service in ’45, I was offered my old duties at RAAF, in a civilian capacity, this time. It’s delicate, maintaining friendly relations with a nearby community, like Roswell, when you’ve got top-secret stuff goin’ on. The press makes requests, the mayor wants to take dignitaries on tours, and sometimes you gotta say no. Me bein’ out of uniform helped smooth that kinda thing over.”
“Did it.” This guy was striking me as a blowhard and a bore.
Kaufmann chuckled, then lifted a hand from the wheel to gesture toward the desolation around us. “You know, looking out at all this tranquillity, you’d never guess such earth-shakin’ events could take place out in these wide open spaces…. First atom bomb went off not far from here, at the Trinity test site. Manhattan Project, that was over at Los Alamos. Did you know that when they set that bomb off, a bunch of the scientists thought there was a real chance it’d spark a chain reaction that’d lead to the end of the world?”
“No.” I was listening closer now.
“Well, they thought that, all right, and went ahead and set it off, anyway. What does that tell you about scientists? Not to mention ol’ Uncle Sam.”
“It is a sobering thought,” I said, and wasn’t kidding.
Kaufmann glanced at me and his eyes had turned as sly as his smile. “You know what they’re doin’ over at White Sands?”
“No.”
“You remember the V-2s, don’t you? Them big firecrackers that leveled London?”
The V-2-the fabled buzz bomb-was a rocket, the world’s first large-scale one, at that.
“Well,” Kaufmann was saying, “over at White Sands, the Air Force is playin’ with captured V-2s, and you know who’s helping them? You know who’s in charge?”
“No.”
“Bunch of goddamn Nazis.”
“Nazis. Are running the White Sands Proving Ground.”
He nodded emphatically. “I’ve seen it with my own eyes. Smooth son of a bitch named von Braun is runnin’ things-he’s a ‘technical adviser.’ He’s not the only one, either-more Nazi scientists runnin’ around over there than you can shake a stick at. Gettin’ kowtowed to, when they oughta be lined up and shot, or maybe hung with piano wire.”
My first impulse was to laugh at this nonsense, but then Teddy Kollek’s words flashed through my brain: You can’t imagine how many scientists fresh from factories run by concentration-camp labor are on Uncle Sam’s payroll, now.
“They’re launching rockets over there,” Kaufmann was saying. “Real Flash Gordon stuff. Revamped V-2s. Trying to see how high they can shoot the sumbitches, trying to be more accurate, go further, carry a bigger payload of explosives. Sometimes, instead of TNT, they’re loadin’ up the noses with photographic equipment, and X-ray, and mice, and even monkeys.”
“What for?”
“The Nazis say we’re goin’ to the moon, someday. Outer space. They talk about it like it’s their goddamn religion.”
This guy was clearly insane-yet another candidate for the suite next to Forrestal’s; I was starting to wish Blanchard had sent me with the MPs, instead. Roswell was looming up ahead, and I was relieved.
And yet I was curious enough to ask: “Why are you telling me this, Frank? This sounds like classified material, to me….”
Kaufmann shrugged, and one eye under one wild eyebrow winked at me. “Some of it is. What the hell, one civilian to another … one veteran to another. Thought you might like to know what your government’s capable of. What our military’s willing to go along with. Jesus Christ, goddamn Nazis! Hell, I’m of German heritage myself, and it sickens me…. You’re a Jewish fella, aren’t you?”
“That’s part of my German heritage.”
“Well, how do you like the idea, Uncle Sam in bed with fuckin’ Nazis?” Kaufmann shook his head, sighed heavily. “I’m sure as hell glad this is my last week.”
“Of what?”
“Of working out at the base. I’ve had all I can stomach of the postwar Air Force. Anyway, I got offered a better job.”
“Yeah?”
His expression turned proud. “I’m gonna head up the Roswell Chamber of Commerce.”
All that smoothing over had paid off.
“Where you staying, Mr. Heller?”
“Don’t you know? You seem to know everything else.”
Kaufmann grinned at me, a big wide grin, maybe not as winning as Blanchard’s but much more real. “You think I’m a bag of wind, don’t you? Well, I’ll tell you something you probably will believe-Jesse Marcel called me and asked me to talk to you.”
“… You weren’t on the list.”
He shrugged a shoulder. “I turned Jess down, at first. Didn’t want to compromise my job.”
“But now you have another job.”
“That’s part of it,” Kaufmann admitted, and this time it was the wild eyebrows that shrugged. “Another part is thinkin’ about what a fool they made out of a good man like Jesse. And another is thinkin’ about what a fool they’re makin’ out of all of us … the great unwashed American people.”
I pointed. “I’m at the El Capitan.”
The hotel, just around the corner from Roswell Drug on Main Street, was just up ahead.
Kaufmann gave me his sliest look yet. “I can drop you there … unless, of course, you’d like me to take you out to the crash site, first.”
“What?” Now the son of a bitch really had my attention. “The Brazel ranch, you mean?”
Making a face, he said, “Hell no, not there; too long a drive, and anyway, there’s nothin’ to see, all that debris got picked up-they vacuumed that damn pasture! I’m talkin’ about the saucer … and the little bodies.”
“Saucer. Bodies.”
Kaufmann pulled over, double-parking the jeep in front of the drugstore, turning to grin at me. “Well, here we are, Mr. Heller-Hotel Capitan. Nice meetin’ you.”
I grinned back at him. “Pretty cute, aren’t you, Kaufmann? How far is it?”
“Just about a half hour. You think what I told you so far was good? Wait’ll you hear this….”
As we headed north, on the concrete ribbon of 285, into a mostly brown, occasionally green landscape of scrub brush and cactus and sand, under a sky as infinite and wide as the blue eyes of a child, Kaufmann told me a yarn that had me laughing in wonder, even as I wrote it down in my spiral notebook. He was, it seemed to me, one of the following: a raving lunatic; an outrageous bullshit artist; or the witness to something truly extraordinary.
On July 2, 1947, Brigadier General Scanlon of Air Defense Command had dispatched Kaufmann to White Sands Proving Ground at Alamogordo, where radar had detected strange movements, indicating an unidentified object flying over southwestern New Mexico, violating the restricted airspace. With orders to report directly to the general, Kaufmann and two others had, in shifts around the clock, charted the object.
“The blips were just dancin’ from one end of the screen to the other,” Kaufmann said. “Now, we’d had similar blips back at Roswell, but intermittent-the thing showing up only when it was above the Capitan Mountains. We kept up watch for almost two days. Then late on the night of July Fourth, God decided to serve up His own fireworks show, by way of one incredible lightning storm.”
At around eleven-twenty p.m., with the storm at its height, the object on the radar screen stopped flitting, began pulsating, growing larger; finally the object blossomed in “a white flash,” then shrank to its original size, dove down and winked out. The assumption was the craft-if that’s what it was-had been struck by lightning and possibly exploded, or crash-landed.
“Two other sites-Roswell and Kirtland-were tracking the thing, so the Army techs were able to roughly triangulate the location of what we took to be a crash.”
The consensus was that the object had fallen somewhere northwest of Roswell. By a little after two in the morning, Kaufmann had returned to the base, reporting in to Colonel Blanchard, who assembled a small military convoy-the base was undermanned, due to the long holiday weekend-of three jeeps, four trucks, one of them a flatbed, one a crane.
“We took along some of those radiation suits,” Kaufmann said, “but we knew it couldn’t be what we call a ‘broken arrow’-a downed plane with an atom bomb aboard-’cause we had all the planes and the bombs! So radioactivity wasn’t really a major concern.”
The convoy had headed out 285, which was exactly what Kaufmann and I in his jeep were doing; his story and our location converged, as-near Mile Marker 132-he turned west off the highway onto “an old ranch road,” a hard-dirt path, the jeep kicking up a small dust storm.
“Hardest part was,” Kaufmann said, “not gettin’ stuck-ground was pretty soft, after the rain … but these jeeps can drive outa anything.”
Soon Kaufmann turned again, near an abandoned ranch house, onto no road at all this time, and suddenly we were cutting across country. At this point, he halted his story to navigate, saying, “Explain the rest when we get there-be easier that way.” The jeep jostled along and at one point Kaufmann stopped, climbed out, snipped a barbed-wire fence with cutters, piled back in, and off we went again, driving over the downed fence, bouncing over some fairly rough terrain, making no attempt to avoid rocks, heavy tangled brush or cactus, crushing or burying everything in our wake.
I held on to the side of the jeep, my teeth rattling as I said, “Are you telling me you drove this at night? Braving gullies and barbed-wire fences? How did you know where to go?”
“We followed the glow,” he said. “It was a halo of light, beamin’ out against the sky. Closer we got, the more the glow seemed to ebb, and fade….”
The jeep was making its way down a gentle slope that gradually became a ravine; then up ahead, perhaps one hundred yards, a forty-foot cliff rose from an arroyo, scrubby green below, thinning to clumps above in a rocky slope that became brown stony ridges.
My guide stopped his jeep and got out.
“Let’s walk on down there,” Kaufmann said, with a motioning wave, “and I’ll show you exactly where the craft was wedged…. Look out for snakes.”
I was halfway out of the vehicle. “What do you mean, look out for snakes?”
“Rattlesnakes tend to get riled when you step on ’em, is all I’m sayin’.”
“I think the jeep could make it down this slope,” I offered.
“Just walk careful.” Kaufmann was laughing, gently. City folks.
I walked careful. “Had the glow died down by the time you got here?”
“Yes, it pretty much had, but we could see the metal glistening, and we knew then and there it wasn’t a plane or a V-2 rocket…. When we got here, we actually came out up there, at the edge of the ravine-damn near went over and crashed into the damn crash! But we circled around to where we are now…. This is it.”
Kaufmann was pointing to a gouge in the sandy ground.
“This is where the craft was embedded-kinda slammed into the sand, got its nose crumpled in the side of the cliff, here. Right off, Colonel Blanchard sent a man in, in a protective suit, to check the craft and the area for signs of radiation. We waited around for the all clear, maybe fifteen minutes, smoking cigarettes and asking each other questions none of us could answer.”
“What did this craft look like, Frank?”
“Oh, six feet high maybe, twenty, twenty-five feet long, probably fifteen feet wide. It sure as hell wasn’t no damn saucer.”
“You said it was.”
Kaufmann made a face, waved a dismissive hand. “That was just to get your attention-it’s the common usage…. This thing was shaped more like a wedge, somewhere between a V and a delta. It had this wraparound window at the front, and the whole thing was split in half, along its side, horizontally, maybe where it got blown open … maybe that was where that scattered junk Brazel found come from. Of course, I always thought there was a possibility the Air Force mighta loaded up some of the wreckage here, and carted it over to the Foster ranch, to scatter it around and confuse things, draw the attention away, onto a bogus site.”
I wiped the back of my hand across my sweaty forehead under the brim of my straw fedora. “Wouldn’t you have known about that?”
“Hell no. I wasn’t in charge! Blanchard was. Now, I could see inside the craft-there was control panels and some hieroglyphic-type writing. As for how the thing flew, I didn’t see any propulsion system, just a series of cells on the underbelly, quartz-type cells, octagon-shaped, like a beehive. I didn’t get that good a look-it was still before dawn, we musta got out here about three a.m.-and we had searchlights from jeeps shinin’ down from on top of the cliff. The colonel wanted us to get that craft onto the flatbed and back to the base before dawn, muy pronto; daylight, somebody else could stumble onto this mess. Then, of course, we had casualties to deal with.”
I was cleaning my sunglasses on my shirt. “The craft’s crew, you mean? The ‘little bodies’?”
Kaufmann nodded, shook his head, his eyes distant. “There were five of these beings…. You know, you see somethin’ out of this world, it shakes you up; we were just kind of stunned, kinda stupefied, not saying a word, just staring. Then finally we snapped out of it.” He pointed. “One body was tossed up against the wall of the arroyo, flung there; another was half in, half out of the craft. I saw one sitting inside, slumped over in his seat, dead as hell. They found another one inside there, later, the men that loaded the bodies in those lead-lined body bags.”
“That’s four-you said there were five.”
“Sorry, I’m … I mean, I haven’t been out here since that night. It’s all kinda … rushin’ back. I didn’t mention the one that was still breathing?”
“There was a survivor?”
“Yup. Wasn’t in bad shape, neither. He was just sittin’ on a rock … right over there, that boulder by the cliff, there. At first he was kinda cowering, then-when he saw we were trying to help, he got the god-damnedest look on his mug … almost serene. Like he didn’t have a care in the world.”
“This world, anyway. What did they look like, Frank?”
The wild eyebrows lifted. “Not like you see in the funnies or the movies. No horns or spiny fingers, and they sure weren’t green.”
So Mac Brazel had said.
“… They were slim, pale, smooth-looking individuals, hairless, fine skin, silver-type uniforms. Five four, five six … fine features, small nose, heads kinda too big for their bodies.”
“Big eyes?”
“Bigger than yours or mine-kinda slanty, Oriental type….” Kaufmann, hands on his hips, was slowly scanning the landscape; his expression was somewhere between sickened and haunted. “Tell ya what, Nate my friend, I think I had enough of this place. Let’s head out. I’ll tell you the rest of it on the way back.”
That was a good suggestion; the afternoon was fading, shadows starting to lengthen, and on the highway I got treated to one of New Mexico’s glorious yellow-red-orange-blue sunsets.
Kaufmann told me that there was concern about the condition of the bodies-one was showing signs of deterioration-and Blanchard’s first stop had been the base hospital. A second team had already been dispatched to further clean up and cordon off the crash site. At the base, each of the eight men who-with Blanchard-had been involved close-up with the operation were ushered into the briefing room, one at a time; Kaufmann assumed his instructions from the colonel-that the “retrieval” was “classified at the highest levels”-mirrored that of the others.
Though his participation had come to an end, Kaufmann understood that Hangar 84 at the airfield became the base of operations, housing both the corpses-and the survivor-and the captured crashed craft. Then the craft went on the back of a truck under a tarp to Wright Airfield in Ohio; the bodies-and presumably the survivor-on a flight, first to Andrews Air Force Base at Washington, D.C., then to Wright.
“Why the stop in D.C.?” I asked. Roswell was up ahead.
“Rumor has it, top-ranking Army and Air Force personnel requested a look at the bodies. Also, Truman and Army Chief of Staff Eisenhower … oh, and the Defense Secretary.”
“Forrestal?”
“Yeah. Isn’t he the guy that had the nervous breakdown? I read about that in Drew Pearson.”
“Mental problems can afflict the best of us, Frank.”
Kaufmann grinned at me. “Is that your way of sayin’ maybe I’m nuts? Maybe I am.”
“Maybe you’re still working intelligence and are feeding me … what’s the word? Disinformation?”
“Why would I do that?”
“You wouldn’t. But maybe Blanchard would. To throw me off the scent.”
“The scent of what?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it? You got any proof, Frank? Any pieces of indestructible tinfoil? Photo of a dead spaceman, maybe? One of their silver suits?”
As I’d requested, he was rolling up to a stop at the parking lot where I was keeping my car. “We weren’t allowed to keep anything, Nate. Not any piece of information or evidence, not a thing. Any report we made got quickly turned over to an intelligence officer.”
“Who, Jesse Marcel?”
“No-those CIC guys.”
Counterintelligence Corps.
“Like that guy Cavitt, you mean, who went out to the Brazel spread with Marcel? What became of him?”
Kaufmann shrugged, leaning on the wheel of the idling jeep. “Transferred. I don’t know where.”
“So where does that leave us, Frank?”
“Leaves you here in this parking lot. I leveled with you, Nate-and you’re free to use any of that yarn, as long as you don’t use my name. If you do, I’ll deny it on a stack of Bibles.”
“That’s comforting.”
“It’s like Mr. Ripley says-believe it or not.”
I stepped out of the jeep, gave him a little wave, and he gave me a big old grin and big old wave and rumbled off.
I was about to get in the rental, to go driving in search of an interesting restaurant, when I said to hell with it, locked my spiral pad in the glove box and walked back to the hotel.
Bone-tired, I stumbled into the hotel, found my way to the dining room, where I consumed a rare steak and all the trimmings and a couple bottles of Blatz, which seemed to be the local favorite-I wondered if the little men in silver suits liked it better out of the bottle or from the tap. My room was on the third floor, a small clean cubicle that could have been in any hotel, except for the framed print of a desert landscape over the single bed. Caked with dust, frazzled by bizarre information, I showered, standing in the tub, letting the needles try to pound sense into me.
No smarter, but cleaner anyway, I toweled off, and strode naked from the bathroom, wondering whether I should take in the show at the Chief Theater down the street, or just collapse into bed, where I figured it would take me maybe three seconds to lose consciousness, in which case I might not wake up to take advantage of the back-door date at ten p.m. I had at Maria Selff’s place, when she got off work at the base hospital.
Instead, a powerful arm slipped around from behind me, an uninvited guest tucked against the wall outside the bathroom door, a gloved hand settling a chloroformed cloth over my face, changing my plans for the evening.
At least I was right about how long losing consciousness would take.