Red Rag Blues (30 page)

“Where's your money?” Luis said crisply. “I'm risking my neck. What are you doing? Making a reading list for some jockstrap university? I need five hundred dollars now. I have
people to pay off. Or the senator will never see these reports. Or the next lot.”

For a long moment Luis thought he had pressed too hard. Cohn gazed at him with his hooded, lawyer's eyes. Kennedy doodled and sneered at the doodles. Schine picked up
For Whom The Bell Tolls
and tossed it into the reject bin.

“Five hundred,” Cohn said. “For that, we expect the Holy Grail.” Luis said nothing. It was a time for letting the other man talk. “Come with me,” Cohn said.

Luis left the building five hundred bucks to the good.

An hour later, Senator McCarthy returned from lunch. Alcohol flushed his face and slowed his speech but it didn't seem to dull his brain. He read the copies of Arabel's reports, skimming some, studying others. “What d'you think?” he asked.

“If they're kosher,” Cohn said. “he's got a terrific source.”

“Bobby? Your opinion?”

“I don't like him, he's on the take, but…” Kennedy shrugged. “Some of these reports are so damn
boring.
Only a bureaucrat writes like that. It's turgid, it's tedious …” He pressed his lips hard together.

“So it's true?” McCarthy suggested. Nobody was ready to agree out loud. Or disagree. “He's either a goldfield or a minefield. And that, men, is what makes politics so interesting.”

He liked the new apartment. It occupied the fourth floor. Big rooms, ceiling fans, French windows onto a large balcony, the traffic on Connecticut just a faint throb, far below. The wallpaper had wide stripes in the colors of the ribbon of the Hungarian Order of Virtue, Third Class, and the air smelled of lemon soap. He heard singing from the bathroom. “She's still here,” he said to Julie.

“Yeah. You throw her out, Luis. If you can. She's got a brain like a pinball machine on a flying trapeze. I told her it was dangerous here, she could get hurt, look at Chick Scatola. She said plenty places are more dangerous. I said—”

“What places?”

“New Orleans. Dallas. She reads the FBI Crime Index in bed. Then she said she could teach me how to save a marriage, she'd had three, all disasters.”

“We're not married.”

“We're as good as married, Luis. We've lived in three apartments, a house and a motel, all in the space of a month. Look what I've done for you. I dumped your fruit-boots, I read your crappy memoirs, I helped you toss a couple of bodies into a canyon. If you were any sort of husband you'd drown her in the bath before she murders Cole Porter entirely. Why are we running from the Mafia? Jesus, I need a drink.”

“We're running because they're chasing.” Luis poured bourbon into glasses, added ginger ale. “Why they're chasing, I don't know. We never harmed them. I had a small problem with the FBI. Does the FBI hire Mafia hitmen?”

“I never heard of it. Cheers.” They drank. “Let's face it, Luis. We just don't know what happened in that Buick. Maybe somebody else shot both those guys.”

“It's pretty certain Uncle Jerome sent Chick Scatola. If we kick the Triple Virgin out, what are the odds she'll go straight to Jerome and tomorrow another of his gorillas will ride into town, looking for us.”

Julie sighed. “Let her stay, then. Better to have her inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in. Did you have a good day at the office?”

“So-so.” Luis showed her the sheaf of reports, supposedly transcribed from Russian files of subversive work by Communist agents scattered across the US. She enjoyed reading them, knowing it was all bullshit but admiring the skill with which the bullshit had been applied. It was like the old days in the Double Cross System, telling the enemy what he wanted to hear. “Those goddamn cunning Bolsheviks,” she said. “I like this stuff about scaring the pants off California with phony data on the San Andreas Fault. Los Angeles is too pleased with itself anyway. And when all this crazy sabotage is exposed as hokum, McCarthy's gonna look foolish. We win either way.”

“Yes. Perhaps.” Luis took his drink for a slow walk around the room. “There's a problem. The senator's staff want cast-iron evidence that the transcripts are from genuine Soviet files. I need a smoking gun. My subversive agents are all ghosts. I need just one All-American hero who has genuinely betrayed his country to the Commies…”

“That ain't easy.”

“Who sez?” Stevie had come out of the bathroom and was drying her hair. “Would Jerome Fantoni be any good? He was a card-carrying Communist at Princeton, back in the twenties. I got his card at home. Ma gave it me as a keepsake. She was membership secretary of the Princeton Communist Party. They were married, see. To each other.”

Julie said, “That makes you …”

“I'm his daughter. We don't speak. Three husbands, no kids, he blames me.” She lifted Luis's drink and took a deep swig. “Also he criticized my driving. You want the card?”

Kim Philby ignored three-quarters of the city. That was where seven out of ten lived: blacks, Hispanics, poor whites and illegal immigrants on the lam from Uncle Sam.

He looked in the other quarter: from Capitol Hill through Old Downtown to Foggy Bottom, and in the comfortable Northwest, from Georgetown to Adams Morgan. Philby walked, and walked. Then he rented a bicycle. It bruised his crotch. He was dripping with sweat long before midday, the taste of salt on his lips. His sinuses suffered from the humidity. He called at every real estate office he saw. All said the same: not their policy to reveal clients' names. He kept hoping for a streak of luck. Perhaps if he tried to call on Senator McCarthy … No. Rotten idea. If Cabrillo saw him, he'd go into deep hiding.

Philby read the Washington papers, dreading seeing his name. In the evenings he sat on his bed and practiced assembling his rifle. And counted his money. Not much left.

*

They drove Stevie to the airport, put her on a plane to New York, and came back later to pick her up. She was carrying a box file tied with a floppy mauve ribbon.

“Ma gave it me the year before she died. Said it was all she had worth remembering. ‘We had some times together, your father and me. We were gonna turn the world on its head.' All she said.”

They drove to a bar, took a corner booth, nobody nearby, ordered beers. Emptied the box on the table.

Birth, marriage, death certificates dating back more than a century. Yellowed snapshots of self-assured men sporting too much hair and tired women wearing too many clothes, and bored children staring, mouths open. Autographed dance cards. A canceled check for $200 from a publisher. Written on the back:
First advance! For first book!
A bronzed baby-boot. A champagne cork with a foreign coin embedded in it. A chain of colored paper clips. A police whistle. A George Gershwin songbook for piano. Some book reviews, stapled together. And a strong buff envelope containing a dozen American Communist Party membership cards from the 1930s, a pocket-size cash book listing names and dues paid, and a pile of glossy 8-by-10 photographs of young men and women in groups, camping, swimming, playing tennis. Names were written on the back. Stevie pointed out her parents. Young, slim, unworried.

“I guess they were in love in them days,” she said. “Didn't last. See, he was never home. The Mob came first. Runnin' the rackets, it takes up a lot of time.”

“These other people,” Julie said. “Were they all at Princeton?”

“Hell, no. Mostly with the Mob. Younger sons. Ma said Jerome thought he'd recruited them, you know, fighters for the cause. Bullshit. It was a joke to them. Joined the Party for the party! Good booze, get laid. It was the Depression, lots of people were Reds. Jerome's crowd were kind of silk-stocking Bolsheviks.”

Luis was studying the names. “Any of these guys still active?”

“Let's see.” She spread the photographs. “Him. And him. Fitz Delaney and Bender Costello.”

“Just two? What happened to the rest?”

“Oh,” she said. “You know.”

The elderly man in a white jacket and black pants served iced coffee, and got lost. The boxer dogs waited until everyone was seated before they stretched out, one on each side of the great brick fireplace, mirror-images of each other. Manners were not dead in New Jersey.

“If you had made an arrest I would have known,” Jerome Fantoni said. “So Sammy's murderer remains at large.”

“Yes and no,” Prendergast said.

Fisk handed Jerome a head-and-shoulders photograph of a man. “Spence Mallaby,” he said. “Had a pest-control business in Queens. Astoria Boulevard at 94th Street.”

Jerome put on half-moon glasses, took the picture to a window, gave it a ten-seconds appraisal, came back. “A total stranger. I know nobody called Mallaby.”

“Too late to start with this one,” Prendergast said. “Heart attack. Dead before he hit the sidewalk.”

“Couple of cops went to his apartment to break the sad news,” Fisk said. “No family. But they did find a small armory.”

“Ah,” Jerome said.

“We made the usual tests,” Prendergast said. “One handgun fired the bullet that killed your nephew.”

Jerome had guessed what was coming. “God help us,” he said. “Pest control. What would drive a man like that to shoot Sammy?”

They drove away. “He's beginning to look old,” Prendergast said. “My guess is he had his nephew snuffed. Little Sammy went moonlighting, ran a little racket of his own, screwed up.
Rustled the wrong herd. These people are all the same: get greedy, get reckless, get dead.”

“He still bled to death in Cabrillo's Studebaker when it was stalled on Broadway,” Fisk said. “Nothing explains that.”

“You're obsessed with neatness. You crave precision. I keep telling you, crime is messy because criminals always bungle. Find a neat and tidy answer and I guarantee you haven't solved the crime.”

Forget answers,
Fisk thought.
We're still working on questions.

In the morning Luis spent a lot of time thinking and then got down to writing.

Julie took Gregg DeWolf's advice and went to Hecht's, the classiest department store in town. She bought a bitter-chocolate outfit with matching shoes, just what a working girl would wear if she owned the company.

Stevie went to the zoo.

In the afternoon, Julie and Luis went to see McCarthy, by appointment. Also present were Cohn, Schine and Kennedy. Luis ignored them. He introduced Julie to McCarthy. “Miss Conroy,” he said. “My agent. She's smarter than I am, a terrifying thought.”

“And a stunning addition to this dreary gang.” McCarthy took her hand in both of his.

“My client does the stunning, senator,” she said. “I just take ten percent of the concussion.”

He liked that. “First time I've done business with an intelligence agent's agent,” he said.

“May I have my hand back? Or should I invoice you first?”

“Ideally, I'd like to take an option on it.” He kissed it, and released it, all done with a kind of aw-shucks backwoods charm.

The kidding was over. Down to business.

“Yesterday I brought copies of certain transcripts,” Luis said.

“I read 'em.” McCarthy was still admiring Julie. “Eye-openers.”

“And your associates asked for supporting evidence.”

“I'm in the public's eye, Mr. Arabel. Everything I do has to be squeaky-clean.”

“We're not selling dishwashers here, senator,” Julie said. “You can't expect Good Housekeeping's Seal of Approval.”

McCarthy tugged gently on his left ear-lobe. He appeared to be thinking. Maybe he
was
thinking. “So what can we expect?”

“Hard evidence of Communist penetration of a billion-dollar American industry,” Luis said. He paused to enjoy the silence, huge as an empty stadium. “Undeniable proof that card-carrying Party members operate at the highest level of organized crime. You've got Reds running the Mafia, senator. The Mob in New York is a puppet of the Kremlin.” Now everyone was talking.

McCarthy pounded the desk until they shut up. “I need names, Mr. Arabel. Give me a name.”

“Jerome Fantoni.”

“Oh, brother!” Kennedy said, leaking excitement for once. “The Fantoni family is up there with Gambino and Costello and Trafficante and the rest. If you've got Fantoni you've got the Mafia by the balls.”

McCarthy looked at Cohn. “One ball, at least,” Cohn said.

“I need to see Fantoni's Party membership card,” McCarthy said to Luis.

“Negotiable,” Julie said.

Luis handed McCarthy a file. “Photocopies, carbon copies of subversive reports, transcripts of Soviet policy discussions, analysis of economic disruption in the New York area … My Russian is a little rusty and the translations were hastily carried out, so the language is sometimes stilted, but the gist is clear.”

McCarthy flicked through the pages. “How about you and Miss Conroy go enjoy a coffee and a Danish and come back in half an hour?”

*

Pages were passed from hand to hand. Speed-reading took place. Minutes passed.

“Enough!” McCarthy said. “Somebody for Christ's sake stick his neck out. I got Jap TV coming here to interview me in an hour.”

“I think it's sensational,” Cohn said. “You'll get three-inch headlines from here to Honolulu. And there's incredible mileage to be got from it! That's assuming the Party cards are genuine.”

“I'd feel happier if we knew more about this Arabel,” Kennedy said.

“You wouldn't know happiness if it came up and blew smoke in your face, Bobby,” McCarthy said. “What's botherin' you, boy?”