1744seenoevil/695
words
8/18.17
See no Evil
A short story
Harley L. Sachs
As a final debriefing I had taken
Harry up to the Tower for a farewell look at New York City
at night. I was told his name was Harry, which is an inside joke in the company,
a reference to Harry Lime of the Third Man. I this case I actually knew his
real name, for we had met briefly between beers at a super bowl party. He had
been there with his young wife and I didn’t linger for a conversation.
Taking agents up in the Tower on their
last night has become a routine ritual for me. We don’t want anyone to spend the last evening in a
bar where they might drink too much and talk, like say where they are going the
next day. Instead I take them out for a swell filet mignon dinner with red
wine. I don’t claim reimbursement for the wine because our bookkeeper is a teetotaler,
so I claim the dessert part of the menu and always pay cash. It’s my chance for
a hundred dollar dinner before I go home to my wife who’s into chemo therapy
for her breast. She’s too sick to cook and I’m no chef.
We call it simply the Tower. Used
to be the Trump Tower
So Harry and I were on the top
floor balcony, looking down over the city. He said he’s leaving for Hong
Kong in the morning but I know he’s flying to Moscow
via Warsaw . It’s not etiquette to
ask much.
The agent called Harry is in his
thirties. I know his history and have to write a contact report on his last
evening in the States. I make those reports as brief and innocuous as possible,
just enough to justify the cost of the meal. You never know who reads those.
We were standing at the parapet
looking down at the city. On a floor two stories down there was some sort of
party and on that balcony there were two men who had separated themselves from
the crowd. Just two men, talking.
Harry said, “Isn’t that, er,
Cannon?”
“Bannon,” I said. “Steve Bannon.”
“Oh.”
“Been in the news again.”
“Yes.”
“Not good.”
“No.”
One second there were two men down
there on that balcony. Then in a blink of an eye, there was only one.
“Did you see that?” Harry asked,
shocked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Shouldn’t we report it?”
“What? You report it? You’d miss your
plane to Hong Kong .”
“What about you?” Harry asked.
I tapped the American flag pin on
my lapel and gave him a knowing look. “Got it.”
“That your Go-pro?”
I just gave him a thin smile like
don’t ask. Everyone thinks we’re equipped with button cameras and other James
Bond shit.
“Oh,” Harry said.
There was a faint sound of a siren
on the street down below. “We’d better go out the service exit,” I said, not
wanting to encounter uniforms in the lobby.
When we reached the street I hailed
a yellow cab to get him back to his hotel. As Harry got into the cab he turned
and asked, “You’ll report it, right?”
I nodded.
He was off.
Before the assassination the
president used to fire people. Pence just kills them.
Not my problem. I’m up for
retirement soon. We have a rule: see no evil. Works for me.
A year later I learned that Harry
had been killed in a car crash in Moscow .
I thought it probably was a car crash. The Russians can’t afford to spend a car
and driver when it’s cheaper to toss someone out a fourth story hotel window. I
wondered what had gone wrong, if the man called Harry had made a mistake, or
someone like Cheney had blown his cover.
