Operation Bamboozle (2 page)

Luis carefully placed his knife and fork together. “Julie … you rip your clothes off and seduce these two nice young men on the table, while I make a run for it.”

“We can't talk in here,” she told them. “Let's go outside.”

They sat on a log. The reporters stood and opened their notebooks. “Suppose we tell you what we've learned,” Rivers said. “Which is that during the war you both worked in London for a department of the British Secret Service called Double Cross. Mr. Cabrillo was a double agent sending reports to the German military, all part of the Allied deception plans, very highpowered secret stuff. Miss Conroy was on that team.”

“I corrected his spelling,” she said. “The poor guy's Spanish. They put the exclamation point first and last. It's a waste of excitement.”

“The war ends, the good guys win,” Rivers said. “Miss Conroy, you return to New York, and Mr. Cabrillo, you move to Venezuela. Correct?”

“We all signed the Official Secrets Act,” Luis said. “You can't print any of that. The Secret Service will hunt you down like mad dogs.”

“This is just background,” Jones assured him. “It doesn't really matter.”

“I was awarded the British Empire Medal
and
the Iron Cross. You can't tell me it didn't matter.”

“Can we quote you on that?”

“No,” Julie said. “Listen: we worked in counter intelligence. Leave it at that. Better yet, forget it. It's ancient history. Who cares? I can't believe the
Globe
is so short of news.”

“Yes, you're right, of course,” Rivers said. He turned a page. “Moving on … Earlier this year Mr. Cabrillo left Venezuela and teamed up with Miss Conroy again. In New York.”

“I was broke, he was broke,” she said. “That's a crime in the USA. There's your story. Page 17 in the Metro Section.”

“Our information is the FBI took an interest. Opened a file on you.”

“Files on both of you,” Jones said.

“Because I was reading
War and Peace
on the Subway. And Luis wore red pajamas. Obviously the FBI had files on us. Jesus! Where do you guys get all this stuff?”

“That shaggy haircut of yours …” Luis pointed at Jones. “Rather UnAmerican, wouldn't you say?”

“Smacks of the Bolsheviks,” Julie agreed. “Fetch a cop. Call the Marines. God Save America.”

The reporters were smiling. “You've got a point,” Jones said. “But the New York angle we're looking at is the Mafia. Seems you made the acquaintance of Jerome Fantoni, who is a major player in that game.”

“Yeah.” Julie stood up and stretched. “His nephew dated me a couple of times. Nothing serious. His daughter Stevie had the hots for Luis, but Stevie had the hots for anyone in pants who would lie still for three minutes. Fantoni asked Luis and me to dinner. We ate, we left.”

“He gave you a Chrysler.”

“He
loaned
us a Chrysler,” Luis said. He pointed. “That's it, over there.”

“Which brings us to Washington DC,” Rivers said. “In the Chrysler.” He was flicking through his notebook. “You go to work for Senator Joe McCarthy. That's hard fact, isn't it? You've been photographed standing alongside the senator.”

“On TV too,” Jones said.

“I was never on salary,” Luis said. “Freelance adviser.”

“Well, this is where we need to nail down the story,” Rivers said. “For instance, the senator acquired written evidence of Soviet subversion in hitherto unsuspected areas of activity. So our source tells us.”

“That source wouldn't be the Washington
Globe,
would it?” Louis asked. “I seem to remember reading something about it there.”

“Subversion in the church, the General Electric company, the Idaho potato crop.” Jones was reading from his notes. “Also The US Treasury, the Ohio school system, the San Andreas Fault.” He looked up. “I don't understand that last one.”

“McCarthy must be a desperate man,” Julie said. She spread her hands and looked helpless. “That's what I read in the
Globe,
anyway. But don't trust me, I'm blacklisted.”

“Maybe the senator is running out of treachery,” Rivers said. “And maybe Mr. Cabrillo sold him some
fresh
treachery, and to prove it's true he provided genuine documentation, in Russian. Any maybe those documents came from an accomplice working in the Soviet embassy. That's what we're hearing.”

“To quote the senator,” Luis said, “that's the most unheard-of thing I ever heard of.”

“It gets better, or maybe worse,” Jones said. “McCarthy subpoenaed your pal Jerome Fantoni on the strength of a dossier you sold McCarthy that proved the Soviets infiltrated and subverted the Mafia.
Then
you sold Fantoni a different dossier that proved he'd been an undercover FBI agent, inside the Communists, in the Mafia, all the time.”

“You checked this with the FBI, of course.”

“They deny it,” Rivers said.

“Deniability is built into their system.”

“And you also checked it with McCarthy,” Julie said.

“He hates the
Globe.
We're all Pinko liberals throwing dust in the eyes of good patriotic Americans.”

“Jerome Fantoni?”

“Unavailable for comment.”

“That leaves the Russian embassy.”

“Out to lunch,” Jones said.
“Dos vedanya.”

Luis got up from the log and put his arms around their shoulders. “You seem like decent, hardworking young chaps. It's sad to see two promising careers threatened by guesswork about fantasy. Possibly you are the victims of a practical joker. We wish you well. Meanwhile, we must head for Arkansas, where we hope to help celebrate the hundredth birthday of Miss Conroy's granny. A big event in Arkansas, but perhaps too small for the Washington
Globe.”

They shook hands. The reporters thanked them and drove away.

“No story,” Rivers said. “Guilty as hell, but …”

“Oh, they did it,” Jones said. “You don't spread bullshit that thick unless you're hiding something big.”

“Double agent and con artist. Not much difference between the two, I reckon. But still … Nobody's willing to go on record. No facts, no story. Damn damn damn.”

“Miss Conroy was something, huh? What the British call a corker. A corker of a New Yorker. Her picture alone would be worth a four-column spread.”

“Cabrillo's a lucky bastard.” Rivers concentrated on the road. With luck, there might be a juicy multiple pile-up ahead, involving a truckload of toilets, a school bus and a blazing gasoline tanker. Anything to make the news editor happy.

Julie and Luis were sitting in the Chrysler, analyzing the Washington
Globe.
“They must have followed us from DC,” she said. “Long way to drive.”

“We deserved more credit for our work in Double Cross,” Luis said. “Young people today, they take the Hitler war for granted.”

“You sound like my old granny in Arkansas. The one who died in Nebraska five years ago.”

“And I felt shortchanged about our McCarthy dealings. They obviously haven't done their homework. Not a word about Stevie. Nothing on The Metal Exchange.”

Stevie—Jerome Fantoni's daughter—had shared their apartment in Washington until she fell in love with an Air France pilot and followed him to Paris. The Metal Exchange was Luis's joke: it was the name he gave his business because he exchanged high-grade Russian paperwork for McCarthy's cash. But the business had been too good to last. It affected too many covert operators—FBI, CIA, KGB, even the Mafia. Cabrillo's doings
angered people. Eventually he was punished with the same blunt instrument that stopped Al Capone. The tax men raided The Metal Exchange.

Luis was elsewhere, doing business, but Julie reached the office just as men with snapbrim hats and short haircuts were smashing the locks. She went to the bank and emptied their account; went home and packed their bags; then found Luis. “Party's over,” she said. “Shut your eyes and pick a town.” She gave him a Rand McNally US roadmap. He opened it blindly and stabbed a finger.

“Unbelievable,” she said. “You have chosen the town of Truth or Consequences in New Mexico. Let's go.”

He drove. “Which way?” he asked.

“West. Just follow the bleached bones of the pioneers.”

They took country roads into Virginia until they got hungry. That was when they had their long conversation with Rivers and Jones. “They were fishing,” Julie said. “If they had any proof, they would've said the paper was going to run the story anyway. They were bluffing. Let's go.”

Ahead lay the Appalachians. They climbed over the mountains and, still using back roads, they entered Kentucky, dipped down into Tennessee and crossed Arkansas. That took them to Texas where they found some fine federal concrete highways which went from one end of that great state to the other and finally delivered them to Albuquerque, New Mexico. It had taken a week.

The car sounded a little weary. They gave it to a garage to be refreshed, and found an outdoors restaurant which offered twenty kinds of omelet, with chilled beer.

Julie spread the road map. Truth or Consequences was 150 miles south. “We don't have to go there,” she said.

He looked at her. She seemed unhappy. It was time to say something wise. “Huh,” he said. But he tried to make it thoughtful and sympathetic.

“We could keep driving,” she said. “Away from DC. Away from all those complications. I want a simple life.”

He looked at the map. “Arizona, Nevada, California. North to Oregon. Alaska. I could be a lumberjack. Simple enough?”

Her beer had a head like a cap of snow. She wrote her name in it with her finger but the name dissolved before she finished it. “Driving this far, it's addictive. I don't want to stop. Keep driving and you're free. Floating along, flying forever until …”

He waited. “Until what?”

“Oh, you live to be ninety, go rockclimbing, break your neck.” She was happy again, or at least not unhappy. So his worry was wasted. Bloody women. He thought of making a witty remark about getting driven to distraction but it took too long to assemble so he abandoned it. Better never than late.

Truth or Consequences would not die of thirst. It had twenty miles of reservoir to its north and much the same to the south. Apart from that, the map was noncommittal.

Julie was driving. She cruised into town and saw nobody. Well, it was New Mexico, it was afternoon, it was hot. “Here we are,” she said. “But where are we?”

“Shangri-la it's not,” Luis said.

She pulled over and parked under a tree. It was next to a building site that had been coming along nicely until the builder lost interest or went bust or died, or all three, and left a flight of concrete steps leading up to half a house. A breeze, as bored as a small boy, chased a yellowed newspaper up the steps, kicked it around and wandered away. “Well, that was gripping,” Luis said.

“You want tickertape?”

“I must say I expected more splendor. This is the West. It should have grandeur. Immense grandeur. Also heroic status.”

“Let's go find the sheriff.” She started the car. “Maybe he'll let you hold his sixshooter.”

Nothing much was happening in the town square. Well, it was still hot. An old man sitting on a bench watched Julie pull into a space between nothing and nothing else. She killed the motor and they got out. “You done wrong,” the old man said. “Can't leave your ve-hickle there. We got laws in this town. Got regulations. You done wrong. See, where you made your mistake was leavin' your ve-hickle where it ain't legal.” He spat.

“Are you the sheriff?” Luis asked.

“Was once. Ain't now.” His voice was weaker. It had been a long conversation.

“We're looking for immense grandeur. It's somewhat lacking in these parts.”

“Get in, schmuck,” Julie told him.

They drove away. She said, “Towns like this, they don't like out-of-State drivers. Soon as he saw our Jersey plates he was really pissed at us.”

“A little cheery banter might have helped.”

“Lack of grandeur? Around here, that kind of banter is an excuse to shoot a hole in you.”

“How quaint. Nobody in New York needed an excuse. What makes these people so fastidious?”

“Fastidious, that's another insult. We need gas.”

She found a Texaco station. Luis walked around the car, kicking the tires to show what an experienced driver he was, and ended up watching the attendant filling the tank. Now this man was the real McCoy. Beat-up cowboy boots, shaggy mustache, corncob pipe. “Howdy,” Luis said. The man grunted. Well, that's how they were in the West: laconic. “Cute little town you got here,” Luis said. “Could a man buy a spread here, real easy?”

“Pay no attention,” Julie said. “He thinks he's Jimmy Stewart. We're from the East.”