Red Rag Blues (16 page)

He ate a sandwich. He phoned Vinnie Biaggi, thinking to warn him, he wasn't sure how; and got a busy signal. At least the man existed. He phoned Harding and made an appointment for four o'clock; felt suddenly weary and was asleep within minutes.

Julie looked in the mirror and saw a wreck. She went out to get her hair done. Not by Stevie.

Max sometimes wondered whether or not he had courage. True courage. In Italy the army gave him a medal for bravery, and the citation commented on his total disregard for his own safety. He often thought about that ferocious little fire-fight and what a horrible mistake it had been.

It happened in the mountains, in the rain. His unit turned a corner and collided with a German unit coming the other way. One of them must have been lost, maybe both, it didn't matter. No time to think about escape, anyway escape was impossible because automatic fire was hacking and scything and grenades were flying, and both sides knew that the only way to live was to
kill, wipe out the enemy fast before he wiped you out. So Max Webber took the most insane risks to kill German soldiers, risks that were not real risks since he had no choice and they were not insane because all sanity had vanished. Where was the bravery in killing to survive?

He was lucky. The bullets missed him. In less than three minutes all the enemy were dead, and so were most of Max's unit; but in the crude arithmetic of war that was victory.

He was awarded a medal, and felt ashamed about getting decorated for saving his own life. Now, sitting in the club car of the Twentieth Century Limited, skimming across the Midwest of America, he remembered that day and he dismissed the memory and drowned it in whisky and water.

He could have flown to Los Angeles. Warner Brothers were paying. But he'd never crossed the country on this wonderful train and besides, it gave him time to think.

His agent, Harry Pinckney, was sitting opposite, reading the Chicago papers.

Farms and fields and small towns went streaming past. People waved. They looked small and dispensable. The real world was here, inside this rich, fast, sleek piece of machinery. Max felt he was riding in the future and looking at the past. “You say the Committee wants more names,” he said.

Harry lowered his paper. “You know any more names?”

“Write these down. Herb Kizsco. Bonnie Scott. Julie Conroy. All in New York.” Harry wrote them in the margin of the sports page. “Well, that's a start,” he said.

“There's a guy called Luis Cabrillo,” Max said. “Alien. Radical. Probably subversive. What the hell … Definitely subversive.”

“Attaboy,” Harry said.

“Oh dear,” Kim Philby said to Luis. “I was afraid this might happen.” They had just come out of the Consulate and he was blinking in the blaze of afternoon sunlight. “How tiresome. Excuse me a moment.”

He crossed the road and greeted Special Agent Fisk as an old friend. “My dear chap! Have you been waiting long? You should have come inside, out of the sun! Too late now …” Philby was backing away, speaking as he went. “Look, we're off for a spot of tea at the Harvard Club, you won't get in, you're not a member, jolly hard cheese … And besides, scarcely anyone gets murdered in the Harvard Club. My regards to the Director.” He rejoined Luis. “The FBI,” he said. “So concerned about my safety. Quite unnecessary. I keep telling them.”

They walked on. “Had you met him before?” Luis asked.

“No. But the haircut, and the stench of duty hanging over him like a cloud of gnats: quite unmistakable. I met a lot of FBI types when I was with MI6.”

“This one's following us.”

“Yes, they follow everyone. Ernest Hemingway told me they've been following him ever since the Spanish Civil War. You were in that, weren't you?”

“Up to my neck.”

“You've read
For Whom The Bell Tolls
?”

“Nobody should write a novel about a war unless he has been killed in it.”

Kim enjoyed that.

Luis had his typescript in a briefcase. As they walked into the blessed gloom and cool of the club, Kim said, “They don't like people doing business in here. Let me take your creation to my room. I'll speedread it while you have some tea. Charge it to me. See you in half an hour.”

He appeared after only twenty-five minutes and approached Luis with a wide smile. “Permit me to shake the hand that wrote
Traitors Abound,”
he said. His grasp was firm. Luis's adrenalin flow kicked in and his blood pressure jumped ten digits. He trusted Philby's judgment beyond that of any man. “Let us migrate to greater comfort,” Kim said.

They moved to a room of overstuffed armchairs. Kim chose a quiet corner, far from other members.

“It needs more work,” Luis said. “The ending …”

“The ending is superb. The opening is a masterpiece. The middle is a magnificent romp. Don't touch a word of it. Not a comma.”

“I see.” What Luis saw was a lengthening line of zeros. He'd asked Harding for a thousand bucks. Make that ten thousand. Fifty thousand. “Glad you found it so … um … readable.”

“Oh, it's a page-turner.”

Luis began to feel uncomfortable. Philby should be offended, or at least hurt; but the man was jovial. He had the chubby smile of a schoolteacher whose student has won a scholarship. “Some people might find the revelations rather shocking,” Luis suggested. Kim nodded. Luis said: “That's why I thought the British government would place a certain value on seeing the book
not
published. Of course, that value would have to match the royalties I would forfeit. Otherwise—”

“Dear boy, no publisher in his right mind will touch your book.”

Luis stared, but Kim was looking at an elephant head mounted high on the wall.

“You said it's a masterpiece. A page-turner.”

“I did. It also happens to be the most libelous document I have read.
Malicious
libel: the worst kind.”

“How can the truth be libel? I've identified thirty-seven agents of the British Secret Service who were active Communists. I've described their Soviet contacts. Listed their code names, the secrets they betrayed. The whole kit and caboodle.”

“They'll sue you and your publisher,” Kim said comfortably. “They'll sue your socks off. You'll both leave the courtroom stark bollock naked.”

“Freddy de Silva won't sue. He was part of your outfit, wasn't he? His car went over a cliff in 1944. I know, because I gave half-a-crown toward a wreath. A much-loved husband and brother, it said. Missed by all.”

“Missed by some. When Freddy's car ran off the road, he wasn't in it. The de Silva we buried was a different chap, same name. Minor civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture. Appendectomy, peritonitis, dead in a week. But the KGB wrote off old Freddy, and that was very helpful to us at the time.” One of Kim's shoes had come loose. He let it swing from his toes. “Freddy's married to a lawyer in Colorado. He won't like being called Communist. Legal fireworks will ensue.”

Luis had slumped in his chair, looking bored and feeling bruised. “Fireworks make good publicity,” he said. “I'll take my chances in court.”

“You'll never get that far. You'll never find a publisher.”

“Yes I will. I'll drop Garcia and every other actual named person. That still leaves two dozen Red agents in the British Secret Service. I gave them phony names.
They
can't sue me.”

“One of them being Gus Brandon.”

“Yes.”

“Funny how certain names stick in your mind. I used to play golf with Gus. You didn't
invent
him, you
remembered
him. Gus was MI6, and I can guarantee that he'll sue. He's a Tory MP now.”

“I'll change
all
the names.”

Kim yawned; he hadn't slept well. “Forget it, Luis. There's a grapevine in publishing, top-level, official-unofficial. Already, word has gone around: stay away from Cabrillo, he's a mad dog, he'll bite you in the ass.”

They walked to the lobby. Kim gave him back the typescript.

“There's one name in here that you didn't mention,” Luis said. “And after I gave you top billing, too.”

Kim beamed. “That was your private joke, wasn't it? Very flattering, but… I honestly don't think I'd make a very good KGB colonel. Just a humble bumf-shuffler on the lower slopes of MI6, if truth be known.” They shook hands. “Mind the traffic,” he said. “Everything's on the wrong side here.”

A man wearing flip-flops, Bermuda shorts three sizes too large held up with string, and a sweatshirt bearing a portrait of Albert Einstein, shuffled alongside Luis as he waited for the lights to change. “Spare a quarter, buddy?” he said.

Luis looked. The sweatshirt was ragged where the arms had been torn off, and what remained was seriously creased and stained. “You're not doing Einstein any favors,” he said. “He looks old and tired and he's got ketchup in his mustache.”

The man squinted down. “That's blood. Got in a fight.”

“It's red. Blood turns black.”

The man rubbed the stain and licked his finger. “Damn, it
is
ketchup.” He sounded worried. “I ain't got no money for no damn ketchup.”

“Triple negative. That's real firepower.”

The lights changed, and they walked. “All I need's a quarter,” the man said. “You won't miss a quarter.”

“What's it for?”

“Get me downtown …” He lost a flip-flop, rescued it, had to hustle to catch up. “Gotta get me to NYU, see, or I miss my class an' they'll flunk me, them bastards—”

“Class in what?”

He took a chance. “English,” he said. What the hell.

Luis stopped. He was outside the garage where he had parked the Studebaker. “English?” he said. “Okay. Listen. This has been a bad day. Things have not gone well. Tell me a joke. Tell me the funniest joke you know.”

“Jeez.” He scratched his face, and scabby flakes fell off. “I ain't heard a good joke in a long time.” He saw Luis begin to turn away, and desperation jogged his memory. “Hey! Here's one about General Grant. Seems Grant was takin' a parade once, on his horse, sittin' his horse, an' the horse lifted a hind foot, an' it put the hoof in one of Grant's stirrups, so Grant says, he says, ‘If you're gettin' on, I'm gettin' off.'”

Luis didn't laugh but he smiled happily. “Excellent!” he said. He gave the man a ten-dollar bill and went into the garage. Ten dollars was wildly generous, cockeyed, crazy. So what? Philby had tripped him and stamped on his balls. It was time to fight back. He gave the Studebaker ticket to Mickey Rooney's kid brother. “You old enough to drive?” he asked.

“Nobody drives better'n me. You sooner have nobody? He's on his break.” The kid didn't wait for an answer. He'd heard them all before.

Outside, Special Agent Fisk was talking to the bum, asking him who he'd just met. “That guy?” the bum said. “He's my professor at NYU.” Ten bucks had changed the day. Changed a man's life. “What's it to you?”

“He teaches at NYU?”

“Whadya think? He washes the floors?” That was funny. That was very funny.

“He got a name?”

“You got a buck?” Fisk gave him a dollar. “Shorty Rogers,” the bum said. “Professor Shorty Rogers.”

“What did he give you just now?”

The bum looked at Fisk and saw a suit and a hat. All his life, a suit and a hat meant trouble. Plus Fisk had mean eyes. He looked like he was born with a sour apple up his ass. “You're fulla shit,” the bum said.

Fisk hesitated. No crime had been committed. If he tried to search for evidence, there might be violence. But he hated to lose
a possible witness. Then a cream-and-brown convertible came out of the garage and nosed through the crowd on the sidewalk. Fisk saw Cabrillo driving, saw him find a gap in the traffic, drift away. Fisk forgot the bum and looked for a taxi. This was the curse of surveillance in Manhattan: you couldn't use a car, too many oneway streets, a subject on foot could lose you without even trying. Taxis hustled past, none empty. Defeat made his shoulders slump like a milk bottle. A taxi halted beside him, the door swung open, nobody got out. “Hop in, old chap,” an English accent said. Fisk hopped. He saw a stocky, youngish man with a fighter pilot's mustache. “If you're not Fisk, I've blundered,” the man said.

“I'm Fisk. I'm following—”

“Of course you are. And so am I. Frobisher. The Studebaker's up ahead, waiting for the lights to change. Don't worry, I shan't lose it.”

*

Luis felt better now that he was driving somewhere, anywhere, it didn't matter as long as he was in command.

The hour in the Harvard Club had flattened him. Philby had destroyed
Traitors Abound,
casually, without raising his voice. Luis had sweated blood creating the codenames, making character sketches for so many traitors, developing KGB operations in Europe and America, keeping the whole shebang balanced and full of pace and surprise. Massive betrayal on that scale was exhausting. It hadn't bothered Philby. He'd sidestepped it. No publisher, no book. Simple. Made Luis looked childish and foolish.

Now he was on the rebound. He gunned the motor and hit the horn, heading west, into the sun, that's what they always did in the movies. He saw a hole in the traffic and swung the wheel but a battered Chevy jumped faster and stole it. Luis stamped on the brakes. The tires gripped like glue. The car lunged. Ironmongery shot forward from under his seat.

By the time he found a space to park, he'd remembered what it was. A Colt revolver, fully loaded. Beside it, a roadmap of Connecticut and a piece of cardboard bearing directions to West 10th Street. Stevie's stuff. Hidden under the seat while they ate in Chinatown. Forgotten.