Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [19]
For two years he had sat on those hot stolen secrets, waiting to see who would come after him, waiting for Hughes to ante up for the big game. But no one had come. And now Hughes was dead. So was the fantasy.
I had to give him a new fantasy. And suddenly I realized that the Pro himself had already come up with it. Instead of playing pair poker, he could play investigative thief.
I mentioned Daniel Ellsberg. The Pro wasn’t at all sure he approved of what Ellsberg had done. Like most criminals, he was a hard-line patriot. Still, he began to warm to the role, to feel important, perhaps even noble.
“If you had the papers, where would you stash them?” he asked me. Before I could answer, he tore a piece of paper from my notepad, crumpled it up into a little ball, and, holding it in front of me, asked, “Where would you hide this? It’s not so easy to hide something so that no one could ever find it. Not even something as small as this. Where would you hide three steamer trunks?”
“Where did you hide them?” I asked in reply.
“Sealed in a wall,” said the Pro, openly admitting for the first time that he had the stolen papers. “Built right into the wall of a house, and the people that’re living there don’t even know it. Been in that wall for almost two years.”
“Are you sure they’re still there?” I asked, not because I doubted it but because I wanted him to. As long as those papers were safely immured, they would remain beyond my reach.
“Pretty interesting that the FBI and the CIA and Hughes all stopped looking, that nobody ever came after you,” I observed. “Have you ever wondered why?”
“Sure,” said the Pro. “What’re you getting at?”
“I was just wondering if they found what they were really after. I mean, you haven’t actually seen the papers for a couple of years. Maybe they’re not in that wall anymore.”
The Pro shrugged it off, but he was clearly disturbed. I had to make him wonder if the papers were gone, if he had already lost his treasure without even knowing it. I had to play on his paranoia until he could no longer live with the doubt, until he just had to go into that wall and get those papers back out.
Several times over the next few hours he asked me if I really thought they might be gone. “Who knows?” I replied. “It would sure explain an awful lot.”
It was late into the evening of the second day when the Pro suddenly said, “Okay, I’m gonna get them out. I’ll show them to you.”
Just like that. It was hard to believe. It had been much too easy. I began to wonder if he really had the Hughes papers, if this was all a scam, if I had been playing him or if he had been playing me, if I had followed another false trail. Or, even if he really did have them, if he was simply trying to keep me from unmasking him by making a promise he never intended to keep.
I didn’t yet understand how desperately he wanted to get rid of the curse. I never really would. Not until I had the papers myself.
I returned from that trip to write my story about the break-in, uncertain now if I had actually solved it. Several times over the next few months I talked to the Pro, pay phone to pay phone, and each time he said he would show me the papers. But not quite yet.
Finally, I went ahead with the magazine article, presenting the case as unsolved, raising questions about who was behind it, never mentioning the Pro, not quite sure how he really fit into it all, also not wanting to put an X on the treasure map.
But there was a hidden message in that story, one that made clear I knew far more, and to make sure that the Pro didn’t miss it, I delivered a copy of the magazine to him personally.
He read the story all the way through, turned back to an illustration up front, a picture of a safecracker opening a Pandora’s box, a vault spewing out all manner of strange and terrible secrets, and, pointing to the burglar, he said, “Hey, that’s me.”
That’s what got him. Not my story. Not my hidden message. That