The Fools in Town Are on Our Side (11 page)

“Never trust a redheaded Mexican,” she once said. That one was lost on me because I didn't even know what a Mexican was. My geography had been so neglected that I was quite sure that Berlin was just on the other side of the International Settlement and that San Diego lay a couple of miles farther on. One of the girls had once told me that the world was round like a ball, but that, I reasoned, was obviously a complete fabrication.

Tante Katerine, sitting before her vanity, slapping on creams and unguents, plucking an eyebrow or affixing an earring, would break off one of her more fanciful tales in which all the men were handsome and all the women beautiful, turn those dark green eyes of hers on me, lower her voice until it was almost a high baritone, and say: “Get this straight, my little
Kuppler
, free advice is the worst kind you can buy.” Or, “Listen well,
petit ami
, nobody's ever as sad or as happy as they think they are. They're more so.” But the one I liked best, because I was never sure that I really had it figured out, was one that she always said at the end of the two-hour operation when she was staring at herself in the mirror and perhaps patting a stray wisp of blond hair into place: “My known vices are my hidden virtues, did you know that, Lucifer?” and I would always say yes, I knew that.

 

 

After Victor Orcutt got through telling me what he wanted done and how much
he was willing to pay me to do it everyone sat there without speaking while I digested the information, much as if it were a half-dozen oysters that could have been a trifle long from the sea. Homer Necessary cleared his throat once. The fretful cable-car bells clanged and railed against the afternoon traffic. A foghorn moaned twice, as if seeking commiseration, or at least sympathy. I got up and mixed a drink and on the way back to the couch stopped to look at Orcutt, who seemed fascinated by the tip of his left shoe.

“How'd you get on to me?”

He looked up and smiled that meaningless smile of his “Do you mean how or why?”

“Both.”

“Very well,” he said. “I think you should know. First how. It was through Gerald Vicker. You know him, I believe.”

“I know him.”

“But you don't like him?”

“It runs a little deeper than that. A mile or so.”

“He has quite an organization,” Orcutt said. “Expensive, but reliable.”

“Then he's changed,” I said.

“Really? He came well recommended and he did produce on extremely short notice.”

“He recommended me?”

“Highly. But you weren't our
only
candidate. There were three others who were put forth by organizations similar to Mr. Vicker's.”

“Who?” I said.

“The candidates?”

“No. The organizations.”

“I don't really believe that concerns you, Mr. Dye.”

“You don't?”

“No.”

I put my drink down on the coffee table and leaned forward, resting my arms on my knees. I stared at Orcutt, who stared back, not in the least perturbed but only curious about what came next, if anything.

“I don't know you,” I said. “I only know what you've told me about yourself and that's not much of a recommendation.”

“You can check him out,” Necessary said.

“I plan to. Maybe I'll be surprised and find that it was just a run of bad luck that got you tied in with Vicker. That could be. But you claim Vicker put my name up for membership in the club. That doesn't flatter me; it scares the hell out of me because I know the only thing that Vicker would recommend me for is something that he could send flowers to.”

“Mr. Dye, I assure you—”

“I'm not finished. Assurances aren't any good, not if Vicker's tied into them. I learned long ago to stay away from people who deal with Vicker. They're usually thieves or even worse, fools. So I'll stay away from you unless you tell me the names of the other three firms that you dealt with. Then I might believe it was just bad luck that got you in with Vicker. But if you don't come up with their names, then we've just run out of things to talk about.”

Orcutt was quick. If he hesitated, it wasn't for more than a second. “Chance Tubio. Singapore. Do you know him?”

“He's okay,” I said. “Some of his people are a little slimy, but he's okay.”

“Eugene Elmelder. Tokyo.”

“The biggest,” I said, “but stuffy, slow, and very, very proper.”

“My impression, too,” Orcutt said. “Max von Krapp. Manila.”

“The best of the lot. He combines Teutonic thoroughness with a vivid imagination. The von is phoney.”

“He was the most expensive,” Orcutt said.

“Then he's gone up. How did you get involved with Vicker?”

“He was one of four names suggested by a completely disinterested party.”

“Why take Vicker's recommendation—why choose me?”

“There is a time factor, Mr. Dye. None of the other three could recommend
satisfactory
candidates who were immediately available. Vicker could. He named you. It's as simple as that—except for the
frightfully
large retainers that the other three organizations demanded.”

I lit a cigarette that I didn't really need and leaned back on the couch. “If you want another drink help yourself,” I said to Necessary. He nodded, rose, and crossed over to the bottle.

“Why go looking in the East?” I said to Orcutt. “Local talent must be plentiful. I've heard that Europe's swarming with it.”

“I needed someone who could command a certain degree of anonymity in the States. It seemed to me that a person who has lived in the Far East for an extended period of time might well have achieved this. More so than if he'd lived in Europe. But I also listed a number of other qualifications.”

“Such as?”

Orcutt waved a hand, his left one. He did it gracefully, I thought. “We were
terribly
frank with all of them,” he said. “Naturally, we didn't tell them exactly what the candidate would
do.
Rather, we told them what he should be.”

“How much checking did you do on the people that you dealt with—Tubio, von Krapp, and the other two?”

“They came
highly
recommended.”

“By whom?”

“I simply
cannot
reveal that,” Orcutt said and I thought for a moment that he was going to pout.

“Hint.”

“All right,” he said. “He was a United States Senator. There're a hundred or so of them, so you can take your choice.”

“Simple the Wise,” I said. “From Idaho.”

Necessary snorted, received a glare from Orcutt, and I knew I was right but it hadn't been hard to guess.

“Senator Solomon Simple,” I went on. “And if I had a name like that I'd change it to Lucifer Dye. Chairman of the Senate External Security subcommittee. He doesn't trust U.S. intelligence—any of it— and he spends a lot of government money with outfits like the ones you've just done business with. How much did he cost you? I mean he's still on the take, isn't he?”

“I made a small campaign contribution,” Orcutt said, his tone swathed in frost. “Perfectly legitimate.”

“Perfectly legitimate,” Carol Thackerty said from her outpost by the window, “but not so small. He nicked you for ten thousand.”

“I refuse to have my—”

I interrupted Orcutt. “You know how he works it, don't you?”

“Who?”

“Senator Simple.”

“Mr. Dye, I want you to know that I consider the Senator a personal friend of mine.”

“So much the better. You should be interested in his personal welfare. He's chairman of the subcommittee that deals with external security. It was created about three or four years ago—”

“I
know
when it was created, Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said.

“After all the ruckus about the CIA's subsidies to labor unions, student organizations, and what have you, including one that never made the papers.”

“What one was that?” Necessary said.

“An international garden club.”

“Crap,” Necessary said.

“But still true,” I said. “Well, the Senator became the darling of the Old and the New Left as well as all the ragtag liberals who see something
sinister in wiretapping, J. Edgar Hoover, the Bay of Pigs, Guatemala, and whatever it was I was doing when they threw me in jail.”

Orcutt squirmed in his chair. Necessary was grinning happily. Carol Thackerty seemed bored by the view through the window.

“Mr. Dye,” Orcutt said, “if you're going to sit there and slander Senator Simple like some … some carbon copy
William Buckley
—”

“I like Buckley,” I said. “I think he's funny. I also think he's right about one percent of the time, although that may be just a little high. But what I think isn't important. I was talking about the Senator.”

“It was just getting good,” Necessary said.

“Well, Simple the Wise—”

“I
wish
you wouldn't use that name,” Orcutt said.

“All right. Senator Simple's subcommittee has contracted with three of the firms that you dealt with to provide him with intelligence reports that mostly concern what's going on in China. If I remember the figures, the contracts are for one million to von Krapp in Manila, two million to Tubio in Singapore, and two and a half million to Elmelder's outfit in Tokyo. They're probably worth it. All of them are good, but they're also profit conscious, which is a polite word for greedy. All of them have branched out into industrial intelligence—or espionage, if you like—and they've made a good thing out of it, especially in Japan. But still, those millions authorized by the subcommittee help meet the payroll. So they got together and decided to put the Senator on
their
payroll. I suppose you could call it a kind of intelligence cartel and the Senator gets X number of dollars deposited in Panama, Zurich, and some other place that I'll think of in a moment. Lichtenstein. The last estimate that I heard had the Senator dragging down about a quarter of a million a year, tax free, of course. If he were to ever balk on renewing their contracts, they'd expose him. So you see, the liberals are right after all. It is a little sinister.”

I could see that Orcutt believed me, probably because it was his own kind of a deal. “Your organization knows this?”

“Sure,” I said. “But it's my ex-organization.”

“Why don't they—”

“Expose him?”

“Yes.”

“Why should they? They get the information from the Senator— even before the CIA—as soon as he's milked it for whatever publicity value it has, if any. If it's too hot, he turns it over to them—free. It's usually top-grade stuff, or nearly so. The Senator's content with his quarter of a million a year. The cartel, if you want to call it that, has got a multimillion dollar annuity as long as Simple stays in office. Of course when he comes up for election next year, they'll see to it that some legitimate funds are dumped into his campaign.”

“It's all real cozy, isn't it?” Necessary said to me. “I like it. I like it a hell of a lot.” He turned to Orcutt. “Couldn't we sort of drop a hint to the Senator and—”

“Shut up, Homer,” Orcutt said. “Mr. Dye, you must have had some reason for telling me this. I wouldn't quite classify you as the town gossip.”

I nodded. “I had a reason and the reason is Gerald Vicker. If the Senator recommended him to you then I have to assume that Vicker's got his hooks in the Senator. I don't much mind the others. Their information's as good as anybody's and sometimes a hell of a lot better. At least that's what my organization—sorry—ex-organization thought. But Vicker's something else. Vicker and I go back a long way. When did you first get in touch with him?”

Orcutt looked at Carol Thackerty. “August third,” she said.

“How much did you pay him?”

“Twelve thousand dollars,” she said, turning her head from the window.

“When did you get his first report?”

“August tenth,” Orcutt said.

“What was it?”

“A six-page, single-spaced precis of you,” he said.

“Detailed?”

“Extremely.”

“Did it say where I was at the time?”

“In jail.”

“Did it say when I would get out?”

“To the day. It also said that you would be brought back to San Francisco, that you would be debriefed for from ten to twelve days in Letterman General, and that you would then be at liberty—I
think
that was the term he used. In fact, Vicker was most complimentary—even effusive—
except
for one thing.”

“What?”

“Well, he said that you might be a little nervous.”

“He didn't say nervous. Not Vicker.”

“He said chicken,” Necessary said and grinned at me. “Are you chicken, Dye?”

I looked at him, studying his brown and blue eyes. The right one was brown; the left one blue. “I don't know,” I said. “I suppose we'll just have to find out, won't we?”

Orcutt had been admiring the toes of his shoes again. He looked up quickly. “Does that mean that you've decided to accept my proposition, Mr. Dye?”

“You mean to corrupt you a city?”

Orcutt smiled the only way he knew how. “That was a little rich, wasn't it?”

“A little.”

“Corn,” Carol Thackerty said. “Pure corn. You can never resist it, can you, Victor?”

“Shut up, Carol,” he said. It seemed that Victor Orcutt spent a lot of time telling people to shut up.

“Well, Mr. Dye?” he said.

“If you'll answer a question or two.”

“All right.”

“What qualifications did you specify other than a certain degree of anonymity?”