Citizen Hughes - Michael Drosnin [20]
The next day we went hunting together.
He was testing me, seeing whether I would go out into the woods alone with him, a shotgun in his hand, whether I would risk that after threatening to nail him, and as we walked through the trees toward a river he asked me if I had told anyone what I knew. I said I had not.
“Don’t you think it’s pretty dangerous to tell me that?” he asked.
“Not really,” I replied. “Who else are you going to find to take those damn papers off your hands?”
I had never gone hunting before, had never shot anything but a tin can, but I was lucky now and shot down a duck, and while the recoil nearly broke both my jaw and my shoulder, I knew I had passed some important rite, had successfully entered his territory.
As we were walking, we talked politics, and the Pro told me he had received a letter from Richard Nixon thanking him for his support of the president’s Vietnam policy. It was dated June 5, 1974.
We got to talking about Watergate. “Square Johns,” said the Pro. He said it with real contempt. “You don’t get a bunch of retired spies and FBI agents to do a break-in,” he added. “If you want to do a break-in, you get yourself some burglars.”
And all the while I kept wondering if this Nixon supporter, this Hughes admirer, this oddly vulnerable professional thief with right-wing ideas and left-wing instincts was really going to give me his stolen secret papers.
While we were sitting by the river, he told me he would. And this time I knew that he meant it.
I told him that I also had to know the full story of the break-in, that I would protect him, keep his name out of it, go to jail myself if necessary rather than give him up, but that I had to know who was really behind the heist.
“I don’t know,” said the Pro.
He told me how it all came down, about the Jiggler and Red and Mr. Inside, and about the mystery man who suddenly appeared the night of the break-in. He told me details only one of the burglars could know, but there was one detail he could not tell me: who was ultimately behind it.
“I never knew,” he said. “I wasn’t supposed to end up with the papers. I always figured that whoever was behind it would come after me. No one ever did.
“Except you.”
My instructions were to go directly from the airport to a massage parlor. That’s what the Pro told me a few weeks later, when he called to say he was ready to show me the papers.
“Just ask for Honey,” he said. “She’ll take good care of you.”
The parlor was on the outskirts of town, along a seedy commercial strip, and inside it was decorated with oil paintings of nude women, all painted with real passion by a convict whose fantasies had clearly run wild while he was locked up in prison. The artist was a friend of the Pro’s, and the Pro owned a piece of the parlor.
I asked for Honey. She smiled invitingly and took me through a beaded curtain to a back room. “Aren’t you going to take off your clothes?” she asked. I hesitated, wondering first if she had mistaken me for a regular customer, then wondering if this was the punch line of a practical joke, if the Pro had lured me into coming for his papers only to leave me naked in his whorehouse. On the other hand, this could be merely a prudent security measure. What better way to make sure I wasn’t wired or armed?
I stripped down to my shorts. “Don’t be shy,” said Honey, and I took them off too. She checked me out, went through my clothes, and when I was dressed again she led me out a back door. We got into a car parked behind the parlor and drove to a garden apartment a few miles away. It was empty, and without explanation Honey drove off, leaving me there alone.
At first I just sat anxiously on the edge of an armchair, waiting to see who would appear, what would happen next. I waited ten minutes, fifteen, half an hour. Nothing happened. A clock in the kitchen showed a different hour than my watch, so I picked up the phone to call