Red Rag Blues (18 page)

Fisk stuck around and nothing happened. He worried about Cabrillo's car, parked in a garage. If he went looking for it, he
might miss out on developments here. Maybe the car was hot, maybe Cabrillo had dumped it. On the other hand …

The problem was resolved, abruptly, as—for the second time in a day—the cream-and-brown Studebaker drove past and Fisk was running, searching for a taxi. Again.

*

Luis was lost, but it didn't matter.

He'd got out of the subway station fast. Its grime and gloom depressed him; he wanted the open air and freedom. He found the garage more or less by accident, and when they brought his car and took his money he realized he didn't know whether he was pointing east or west, uptown or downtown. So he just drove, followed the cars in front, tried to relax and enjoy being in control of his life once more. He was so relaxed that he didn't even recognize 10th Street when he went along it.

Fisk found a taxi. Well, something had to go right eventually.

Luis went with the flow of traffic, crossed Broadway, which didn't look exciting. Crossed Fourth Avenue, also nothing special. Part of his mind was still down in the cellar, discovering bodies. A truck pulled out in front, so he followed it, across Third Avenue. Up ahead the lights changed to red and he stopped. Now at last he began to get his situation straight. He was heading east. That was no good. East went nowhere except into the frightful urban desert where Max had lived. To get back to Central Park West he must first drive north. The lights changed. The truck moved on. Luis turned left, north, uptown, into Second Avenue.

Fisk's driver saw the Studebaker turn and he laughed. “Ain't goin'
there,”
he said. “You ain't got nuff money to pay me to go
there.”
Horns blared behind them. He crossed Second.

Luis stopped, halfway up the block. He faced a tidal wave of traffic. Second Avenue was one-way, downtown. Five lines of traffic came at him, all meeting green lights in a relentless surge. He spun the wheel, pulled hard over, stopped, shut his eyes, let everything roar past, blasting him for his idiocy. Than he made a screaming U-turn and fled, soaked in sweat.

Fisk saw none of this. He had given up the chase. The cab took him back to the FBI Building. Its driver was still amused. “One guy against the world,” he said. “I think I saw the movie.”

*

Fisk found a message: his boss wanted to see him. He walked down the corridor, wondering how best to summarize recent events. Prendergast pointed to a chair. “I lost him,” Fisk said.

“Well then, it's just as well I found him.” Prendergast was so calm he must be happy. “As the movies say, the Bureau never sleeps, and a round-the-clock search has located the suspect's place of residence. So we're off and running.”

“I got the numberplates of his convertible,” Fisk said.

“It is not a crime to drive a Studebaker,” Prendergast said. “It should be, but it isn't.”

“And he's in cahoots with Sammy Fantoni.”

“Cahoots is not a crime either, except to the English language. Now listen. There's more to this Cabrillo than bank robbery, on which we have no hard evidence anyway. He's linked with Philby, and our file on Philby is thick as a brick. He knows where the bodies are buried. I'm talking about Un-American Activities. This could turn out to be big. This could knock Senator McCarthy on his ass. So we play this fish carefully.”

“I knew it,” Fisk said. “I knew it as soon as I saw those boots.”

Senior staff at the British consulate could join the Williams Club. It was far smaller than the Harvard Club but the fees were a lot more affordable. Also it had squash courts. Harding and Frobisher got changed, went into a court and began smacking a couple of balls about. Philby, in stockinged feet, stood between them and got ready to dodge. American squash balls were as hard as little apples, and they flew like hornets.

Harding liked to hold especially sensitive meetings in this squash court because it was almost impossible to bug the place. Noise echoed off four hard walls and canceled the voices. Yet the three men could hear each other. This was high-grade low-budget technology, and when the discussion ended you could have a damn good game of squash.

“He's in a penthouse on Central Park West,” Harding said. “HUAC got some new addresses out of Max Webber, and the FBI had the list in no time.”

“HUAC leaks like a sieve,” Frobisher said. He volleyed hard, three times.

“Hoover hates the Committee, of course,” Harding said. He slammed a fierce backhand. “Hoover wants to catch all the Reds himself.” Another backhand. “Anyway, as soon as his New York office got the details, they started cross-checking.”

“Basic legwork,” Frobisher said. He hit some forehand drives.

“Bend your knees, for God's sake,” Harding told him. “Watch the ball.”

“And are they going to arrest him?” Philby asked.

“Doubtful,” Harding said. “The FBI is short of hard evidence against him. And Mrs. Conroy has already been blacklisted. They don't give a damn about her.”
Whack-bang
went the backhand.

“How does this affect us?”

“Options, sir,” Frobisher said. “If Cabrillo is a really serious threat, we can use expunction.”
Whack-bang.
“Or we can leave him to the FBI. They've always been keen to nail him for bank robbery, and now that he's mixed up with the Mob, they're keener than ever.”

“Expunction has clear advantages,” Philby said. “It closes the file.”

“Depends how it's handled, sir.” Harding caught the ball and checked it for cracks. “Cabrillo can easily be expunged, but what happens to the remains?”

“Suppose Cabrillo vanishes,” Frobisher said. “Mrs. Conroy raises merry hell. The FBI intensifies its search. Heaven alone knows what embarrassing material they dig up.”

“And if a body
is
found,” Harding said, “the FBI's bound to come looking for you, sir. They know you met him today. That's not going to help your reputation, is it?”

“So expunction is out,” Philby said. “For the time being, anyway. A pity. Such a useful word. Where did you find it?” he asked Frobisher.

“In
The New York Times
crossword, sir.”

“Golly. I wish I had your brains … Well, at least we know where he lives. That's something.”

Philby left. They played their squash and Frobisher won, 3-1. He was stocky, but he was fast.

Julie was on the phone when Luis came in. He kissed her on the back of the neck and she tasted salty, so he licked his lips and realized that the salt was his, a deposit he had leaked at Second Avenue and Tenth when he saw five lanes of traffic charging at him head-on, lined up like cavalry, lights flashing, horns blaring, raising a surge of sweat that had soaked his scalp and dribbled into his eyes. Even now, his undershirt was drenched.

He stripped and stood under the shower. The spray pounded his skin and stripped it of sweat, but the memory remained. Five lanes of angry traffic could not easily be washed away.

He was sitting on the laundry basket, cooling off, when Julie came in with two large gin-and-tonics. He reached for one. She stopped. “What happened to your neck?” she said.

“Oh. That.” He didn't have the strength to get into a long explanation. “Accident. Head got caught in the elevator. The doors sort of banged …” The drink was only six inches from his grasp.

“Bloody liar.” She turned away, and ice chinked. “I've seen bruising like that before. Someone tried to strangle you.”

“My fault. He was music critic of
The New York Times.
I upset him. He strangles people who upset him.” She didn't believe that either, and he had to tell her everything. His voice croaked occasionally. She relented and gave him his drink. It cooled and calmed his voicebox. He decided to finish the story fast. “Traffic was bad on the way home. Still, I made it.”

She wasn't interested in traffic. “You went to Philby and he spiked your memoirs,” she said, “so you went to Vinnie Biaggi and he wasn't here, but you couldn't leave it at that, and you annoyed a gorilla from Jersey. All the time, you've got a Fed and a mustache from MI6 tailing you. Then Sammy Fantoni shows you out through the Mob's fresh-meat department. Here comes the bad part. You hit the rush hour. Well, some days nothin' goes right.”

Luis used his toes to try to pick up his undershirt. “Look at all that sweat,” he said. “What a waste.”

“Survival mechanism, Luis. Fight or flight. Didn't you do any biology at school?” She went off to make more drinks.

“The Jesuits prohibited biology,” he called. “We did Advanced Guilt instead.”

She came back, looking thoughtful. She said, “Technically, in the eyes of the law, you're a witness to murder, aren't you?”

He didn't want to talk about it. He sucked an ice cube instead. She recognized that mood: he had regressed to the age of twelve. He made his legs pigeon-toed and knock-kneed. “Let's hope they dump the stiffs in the Jersey swamps,” she said. “Then maybe they'll forget you exist.” He stuck out his lower lip and squinted downward, trying to see the lip. “I told you this city's dangerous,” she said. His mouth hurt, so he relaxed it.

“Haven't you got an opinion?” she said.

“Yes. One. I'm naked and you're beautiful.”

She tipped her head to one side and looked him over. Why did he have to act so dumb? Though sometimes he was right. This was one. He was naked, and she wasn't the ugliest broad on the block. Sometimes he was smarter than the entire Nobel Prize Academy on skates. “If you put it like that,” she said. “Why the hell not?”

Kim Philby was on the slide. He was 41, which meant fewer years ahead than behind. He knew it shouldn't matter. Seize the day, for tomorrow is never more than a promise. Or a threat. Now he sat in his room at the Harvard Club and thought of a man who had said to him, “Fuck the facts. How old would you
think
you were, if you didn't know your actual age?” That man was dead. Dead at 45. Keeled over on the ninth green at Wentworth. What could you say? Time ran out.

Bloody time. Bloody age. Bloody golf.

Bloody Cabrillo.

He looked at his watch. Another thirty minutes gone, wasted, lost. He got his hat and went downstairs and walked the half-dozen blocks to the consulate and met Harding as he was leaving. That was lucky.

“I've been thinking some more about our problem,” he said. “The simple fact is Cabrillo knows too much. He was up to his neck in the Double-Cross System throughout the war. It's still top secret, for the very good reason that all those double agents we used might come to a sticky end if their controllers in German intelligence learned the awful truth. Ex-controllers, I should say.”

“Those types never retire,” Harding said. “They just brood. But Cabrillo was a double agent, wasn't he? Won't that make him keep his mouth shut?”

“You've met him. What do you think?”

“He's a loose cannon. Normal rules don't apply.”

“Exactly. We've agreed that expunction is out, because of J. Edgar bloody Hoover. But what about semi-expunction?”

“A warning shot across the bows?”

“Perhaps
into
the bows?”

“It wouldn't backfire? Make him dig his heels in? You know him better than I do, sir.”

“He's never experienced physical pain. A bullet in the leg will come as a nasty shock. He won't risk another.”

“And there's his partner. She has legs, too.”

“Double the discouragement?” Philby tried to picture the scene. “No,” he said. “One bullet in the leg is just another statistic here. Two bullets in two legs is a news story. We don't want that.”

They went up to Harding's office. He flicked through a file and gave Philby a card. The name on it was Spence Mallaby. His business was Pest Control. Philby cocked an eye.

“A sense of humor does no harm,” Harding said.

They were talking about dinner, and what kind of food they felt like, when the phone rang. Julie took it. The call was brief.

“We're eating Italian,” she said. “That was Sammy. His uncle in Hoboken invites us to dinner.”

Luis felt his neck. “He'll kill me again.”

She shook her head. “Doubt it. These people are hot on manners. Nobody's allowed to read the sports pages at funerals.”

“Yes, but Hoboken… I was snubbed by a bum at Hoboken. Why do we have to go?”

“One, the Mafia always eats well. Two, if we don't go, he'll send for us. Put your pants on, Luis. I'm hungry.”

The sky was heavy with cloud, trudging north like a beaten army. Somewhere south, Maryland maybe, the fag-end of a tropical storm was pushing air ahead of it, making a breeze that shook the tops of the trees in Central Park. Below the trees, two dogs, one big, one not, stood and barked at each other. They barked as if they were getting paid by the bark and it was steady money. They were still barking when Luis and Julie drove away.

They took the West Side Highway to Holland Tunnel. Luis was wondering why the FBI had followed him to 10th Street. And why Frobisher? Maybe they were following him now. In the movies, the guy driving the car said
I think we're being tailed,
and the other guy looked back and by God, they always were. Luis looked in the rearview mirror and saw about a hundred cars.

Julie was not wondering why the FBI had followed Luis—the FBI followed all her friends, had done for years, it was a badge of friendship. But Frobisher was different. Philby was different. Was Luis tap-dancing back into their world of smoke and mirrors?
Nobody could think seriously in a convertible. She rested her head and watched the sky and the gulls and the tops of buildings drift past.