THE COWARDLY LION, Volume Six, Chapter VIII

The train ran. The locomotive puffed smoke and made a singular sound as it raced around the small track under the tree. I celebrated with Quincy, both of us way too inebriated to do anything but thank

God, for his intervention in helping us bring the hundreds of parts together to allow for such a Christmas morning performance.

“Take one of the new satellite offices as your own,” I said to him after my third Bacardi and Coke. “I didn’t expect what you are, and I’m not even sure of what the hell it is that you are, but you’ve made your way through the labyrinthian process of coming to my attention and having me trust you. Phil Marlow is another matter, as well as his being launched without the necessary credentials to take me out.”

“Credentials,” Quincy asked, without going on any further.

“He’s not a sniper, and so he should have chosen a form of attack that didn’t call for something so specialized or artful to accomplish his mission. He failed, and that will cost him his life, most likely, and the woman who sent him as well.”

“Okay, thanks. I think I’d like to work with you here in New Mexico on whatever this really is. I don’t believe in UFOs or any of that, but does that matter?”

I looked around the dining room, which was really part of the living room because the house was so small. Quincy appeared to be the real deal I’d guessed him to be. Was he allowed to be part of my family? I didn’t know. I had to have a complete background and then get him in front of both Nguyen and Kingsley.

“You’re armed, aren’t you? Quincy suddenly asked.

“Does it matter?” I asked back.

“You’re that tiger predator in the bush, aren’t you? Don’t get upset that I know that or can see that,” Quincy said. “This may be as close to death as I’ve ever been, and I didn’t realize it until just now. You’re letting me live, and that feels wonderful.”

I stared into the man’s opaque brown eyes. I wasn’t ready or asking to be revealed as a predator. I was in my own home, and I’d welcomed the man into my most personal inner sanctum. I didn’t know what to say.

“Your closest call was out in that desert, not me here, and we need more Bacardi,” I whispered across the table.

The train ran on its oval track, puffing away until Bozo interrupted its course of travel. With one swipe of his right paw, the locomotive went rolling off the track and onto the dining room rug. Bozo retreated. The train’s motor went silent. A puff of smoke from its unaccountably strange construction hissed out before things went silent.

“I’ll go to the liquor store,” Quincy said, getting up off the floor where I still lay with the remains of the train.

“You know where it is?” I asked him.

“A few blocks away…he replied.

“Go,” I said, pointing at the front door not far away.

Our eyes met. We looked at one another intently, but for only an instant.

It was decision and trust time. I had to force him out of my home in order to give him the freedom to trust and return, but I could not be certain that we were both on the same page. If he drove away and never came back, then I would know he wasn’t what I might want in my life, although that might not make him my enemy.

“Young’s Liquor Store, about six blocks to the north on South Ola Vista,” I repeated, and then stopped talking.

“Okay,” Quincy replied as he got up and walked to the front door.

I waited, putting the locomotive back on the tracks. If Quincy were truly afraid for his life, then he wouldn’t come back. We had plenty of Bacardi in the bottle, and he’d have noted that. If he didn’t return, that was one thing, but if he did come back, he was all in. I wondered what might be racing through the man’s mind.

I lay down under the tree. Christmas was so special, but it was a short-term palliative in life, and I knew it. I relaxed, as Bozo and our new Russian Blue cat, now named Pushkin, came to sit under the tree with me. I didn’t understand cats, and my wife let me know all the time about why cats were cats and how they seemingly, impossibly, pushed the outer edges of human understanding.

I lay there, looking up through the lights, the lights reflecting off the tinsel and all of it. It was all going back to quantum theory, quantum mechanics, and therefore Schrodinger’s cat. I smiled up into the tree, the Christmas music, the Oh Holy Night record repeating on the stereo, and me, with two cats having no idea at all whether they were living or not.

I stopped, as life had seemed to stop all around me. Was the cat living or dead? Was Quincy coming back? Was my family, asleep in their beds, really mine and there? The words ‘tinker, tailor, soldier, spy came down out of the tree to fall around me, the unreality of broken glass parts from the memories of some espionage writer’s imagination, becoming a bitingly humorous part of my real life.

My life was like a bullet. I was twisted, turned, and spinning at a speed almost impossible to measure. I was aiming. I was propelled. I was charged, and I was ridiculously unaware that I was way outside of my own control. What was I going to strike and what would be the result of that impact? If I survived that, then what would be the next launch point, the next cartridge loaded into a gun I’d chosen but not understood was a gun at all?

It was Christmas morning. Nobody else was up except maybe Santa, a character about as made up as I was becoming to be. I had no sleigh, no loyal downtrodden reindeer or any of that. I sure as hell had elves in droves, though. Money, equipment, and more. Santa’s elves had nothing on my guys and gals. I’d reached a point of weary, tired, and downward-seeming depression and was thinking that way until the front door opened and Quincy made his presence known. The cat was alive, and also so was I!

The violence of life in the outside world was beyond belief, and that I would have somehow chosen to be a part of it was almost beyond that kind of belief. Christmas was a time of anything but violence. It was all about anything but that. The world created and now existing seemed to be surrounded by anything but peace and tranquility. In the depths of my innermost feelings, I knew that I didn’t want the violence, but in the reality of my outward presentation and existence, I knew I was truly gifted at living in that world and applying violence as a means to affect an outcome not available by convincing arguments or applied logic.

I was fast coming to believe that belief itself was so much a greater force than human recognition and response to reality. Joseph Campbell and the power of myth had gained much in its power over me.

“You take the office job and run with it,” I said to Quincy, “and keep that name with the staff. I like it and why you selected it. Three offices and the UFO materials, whatever they may be. I’m still not sure I’m fully on board with believing in that, but then there’s the artifact to go to my very foundations of such beliefs.

“What artifact?” Quincy asked, letting me know he wasn’t fully informed about everything involving why the entire project might be founded.

“Who brought Phil Marlow in on the failed assassination mission?
I asked, changing the subject completely.

“I’m not sure,” Quincy replied, taking another drink of his Bacardi and Coke.

“He vacationed on Mallorca, the island I had mafia problems with, and that means he was sent in by that group or the woman leading it now. But that doesn’t explain how he penetrated the CIA cover for such things, my assumed identity on the island or my home, family, or any other of the vital information he has or had.”

“Jesus Christ,” I whispered across the table, although relieved that the artifact discussion would probably do no further, at least not in the short term. I didn’t want to lose any more credibility that I might have already lost. People do not believe stuff, even if it’s put right in front of them, if it’s too far from what they believe. “Who is Phil Marlow, and how did he penetrate the system. He reached Doctor Bethe, for Christ’s sake. He knows about this new UFO accumulation expansion series of offices and programs. He arranged for me to be where you dropped me out there in the desert. How was that possible, although I do understand you may not know.

“He’s a DEA informant who’s been allowed cross-department access,” Quincy said.

I looked at him, taking a drink of my own Rum and Coke mix, and wondered if he really knew what he was talking about. He was an analyst, not a field agent. That meant his experience out in the world wasn’t truly significant, if he was telling the truth, which I guessed he was.

I sat in front of him, my exterior expression unchanged, but my interior mind in turmoil. Had the CIA been so easily fooled? Did this mean that if I continued that my family might be continuously threatened, or worse?

Christmas morning was coming, and that would be a big deal with the kids and my wife. I had to shut down our meeting, although I felt like Quincy didn’t want to leave. What I had with my small Spanish bungalow, wonderful wife, great kids, and even very interesting cats, was something I felt Quincy wanted in his own life but didn’t have. I took another drink of the mix. I could not give him what was mine, even if I wanted to. Mary, Julie, and Michael were seemingly distant to him, but they were decision makers in my life. Decision makers, I was not going to ask you to decide for him.

“They’re not going to kill Marlow,” Quincy said, “and you know it. If you do it yourself, then everyone will know, and you’re in the USA, not in Mallorca.”

“On Mallorca,” I replied, my mind racing, “it’s an island, not a country.”

“Oh,” was all he replied.

“DEA?’ I asked, not directing the question toward Quincy but more to myself. “If he’s DEA, then they could send him on a mission to Colombia, where he’d be out of play.”

“And you could go to Colombia when he was there?” Quincy asked, smiling over at me.

“You’re catching on to real field work pretty fast,” I said.

“It’ time,” I suddenly announced, getting to my feet. “You have to be able to drive, and I’ve got to get down and get ready for Mary and the kids.”

Quincy got unsteadily to his feet and stuck out his hand.

I stared but took his hand. It was like we were concluding a special arrangement, which it sort of was. Quincy was in, and if the alien stuff he was supposed to open offices to investigate in certain places in New Mexico was real, funded, approved, and the rest of it, we were going to be partners. How Marlowe had gotten so deep into the system of the CIA as a lowly informant would remain unknown until I could find out more.

Quincy left, and I shut the door and turned out all the lights except for the Christmas tree. It was such a thing of beauty, I wanted to enjoy it for as long as possible, but I had to get into bed.

Christmas morning came and went with unbelievable speed; the enjoyment and play of both kids was something to behold. The train puffed its way around the oval track so many times that the retention chamber for the oil that made the smoke had to be refilled so many times that the container went dry. I shook my head. Where did one go to buy model train smoke oil? Another unresolved mystery. Julie diligently replaced the locomotive carefully and delicately every time the cat knocked it down. I knew that alone would become a Christmas tradition, as long as the cat and train survived.

The day after Christmas, I went to the office and called Tony on the secure phone.

I filled him in about Marlowe and the incident.

“I heard,” he said when I finally finished with my request to somehow have Marlowe sent to Colombia so I wouldn’t be exposed again.

“From whom?” I asked in surprise.

“From Paul or Quincy, as he likes to be called,” Tony replied.

“Quincy’s not an official cover identity?” I asked, surprised again.

“We’re in the states and he’s not field material, so he took the name to make believe he was real, or unreal, hell I don’t know,” Tony said, “he’s an odd duck but your odd duck now.”

“I’m confused,” I replied, shaking my head. “Is the UFO part of this real?”

“I don’t believe in UFOs,” Tony answered.

“What about the artifact?”

“That’s a lump of some element or mineral we don’t know anything about, not something made my aliens.”

The artifact wasn’t probably alien, I thought to myself, but its existence and strangeness certainly made it easier to believe that aliens had existed and maybe still did.

Quincy appeared outside my door as I hung up the phone with Tony’s assurance that Marlowe would be handled and a warning that I shouldn’t take any action at all. The mafia on Mallorca would also be physically encountered, whatever that meant.

“How’d you get in?” I asked him, knowing I’d locked the door after getting myself only minutes earlier.

“I’m in the CIA,” he said, pulling a small device from his pocket about the size baseball. You put this over the lock, almost any lock, hit the button, and it opens almost any door lock or deadbolt made. Felony to possess or use. Neat.”

“Why are you here on a holiday?” I asked, realizing that Quincy thought of CIA field work as some sort of entertainment.

“The door, the alien piece out in the desert, is still out there, and we have to pick it up, or somebody does.”

“I know just the somebody for that job,” I replied, not wanting to go back out there again, but also realizing I could not send Kingsley or Nguyen out there alone or without being fully informed about what had happened during the first potential pick up.