Hit Man - Lawrence Block [85]
“Why would I do that?”
“Never mind. You’re alert, which is all to the good. And I’m not surprised. I know who you are, and I know what you are.”
“Just a man trying to eat his breakfast,” Keller said.
“And a man who’s evidently not put off by all that scary stuff about cholesterol. Salami and eggs! I have to say I admire you, Keller. I bet that’s real coffee, too, isn’t it?”
“It’s not great,” Keller said, “but it’s the genuine article.”
“My breakfast’s an oat bran muffin,” Bascomb said, “and I wash it down with decaf. But I didn’t come here to put in a bid for sympathy.”
Just as well, Keller thought.
“I don’t want to make this overly dramatic,” Bascomb said, “but it’s hard to avoid. Mr. Keller, your country has need of your services.”
“My country?”
“The United States of America. That country.”
“My services?”
“The very sort of services you rode down to Washington prepared to perform. I think we both know what sort of services I’m talking about.”
“I could argue the point,” Keller said.
“You could.”
“But I’ll let it go.”
“Good,” Bascomb said, “and I in turn will apologize for the wild goose chase. We needed to get a line on you and find out a few things about you.”
“So you picked me up in Union Station and tagged me back to New York.”
“I’m afraid we did, yes.”
“And learned who I was, and checked me out.”
“Like a book from a library,” Bascomb said. “Just what we did. You see, Keller, your uncle would prefer to cut out the cutout man.”
“My uncle?”
“Sam. We don’t want to run everything through What’s-his-name in White Plains. This is strictly need-to-know, and he doesn’t.”
“So you want to be able to work directly with me.”
“Right.”
“And you want me to. . . ”
“To do what you do best, Keller.”
Keller ate some salami, ate some eggs, drank some coffee.
“I don’t think so,” he said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I’m not interested,” Keller said. “If I ever did what you’re implying, well, I don’t do it anymore.”
“You’ve retired.”
“That’s right. And, even if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t go behind the old man’s back, not to work for someone who sent me off on a fool’s errand with a flower in my lapel.”
“You wore that flower,” Bascomb said, “with the air of a man who never left home without one. I’ve got to tell you, Keller, you were born to wear a red carnation.”
“That’s good to know,” Keller said, “but it doesn’t change anything.”
“Well, the same thing goes for your reluctance.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s good to know how you feel,” Bascomb said. “Good to get it all out in the open. But it doesn’t change anything. We need you, and you’re in.”
He smiled, waiting for Keller to voice an objection. Keller let him wait.
“Think it through,” Bascomb suggested. “Think U.S. Attorney’s Office. Think Internal Revenue Service. Think of all the resources of a powerful—some say too powerful—federal government, lined up against one essentially defenseless citizen.”
Keller, in spite of himself, found himself thinking it through.
“And now forget all that,” said Bascomb, waving it all away like smoke. “And think of the opportunity you have to serve your nation. I don’t know if you’ve ever thought of yourself as a patriot, Keller, but if you look deep within yourself I suspect you’ll find wellsprings of patriotism you never knew existed. You’re an American, Keller, and here you are with a chance to do something for America and save your own ass in the process.”
Keller’s words surprised him. “My father was a soldier,” he said.
Breathes there the man, with soul so dead, Who never to himself hath said, This is my own, my native land!
Keller closed the book and set it aside. The lines of Sir Walter Scott’s were quoted in a short story Keller had read in high school. The titular man without a country was Philip Nolan, doomed to wander the world all his life because he’d passed up his own chance to be a patriot.
Keller didn’t have the story on hand, but he’d found the poetry in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, and now he looked up patriotism in the index. The best thing he found was Samuel Johnson’s word