Red Rag Blues (8 page)

Next morning, while he was in the bath, she took his suede shoes and twenty dollars from his wallet, went out and bought a pair of black loafers, same size and width. She came back without the suedes. “I'm not going around this city with a guy looks like he plays with the pixies,” she told him. “I've got my reputation to consider.”

“May God forgive you. I never shall.” But the loafers were comfortable. Later that day he bought another pair, in brown.

By then, they had sublet a small penthouse apartment on Central Park West. “It's cheap because it's short,” the agent said. “The tenants are in Europe for three months. They return, you're out. Have a nice summer.”

“Ample time to achieve our goal,” Luis said. “We are rabid Marxist-Leninists. In three months, all this will be Bolshevik.” He waved a hand at Central Park. Julie shook her head.

“That's nice,” the agent said. “The doorman's name is Mike. Tip him five bucks a week. Don't water the cactus. Anything else I can tell you?”

“For an underground movement, we're awfully high up,” Luis said.

“It's just an act,” Julie said wearily. “He's just an actor.”

“Sure.” The agent gave her the keys. “I nearly voted Democrat myself, once.” At the door, he paused. “Nearly forgot. The hot water is very, very hot.”

Luis was playing with the TV. “It's such a hulking great thing, yet it creates such a terribly small picture,” he said. “Can't see any future in it. Not much present, either.”

She switched the set off. “Look: put your tiny brain in gear. You want to get us dumped on the street again? Jokes about Bolsheviks in Central Park don't play in this city. You listening?” She shoved him until he stumbled. “What d'you think the agent meant when he said the water's very, very hot? Wake up, Luis, for Christ's sake.”

“Um,” he said. “Perhaps even double-um.” He went away and took a shower; came out wrapped in towels. “Absolutely right,” he told her. “Very hot indeed.”

*

There was a phone, and it worked. She asked Bonnie Scott to come over for lunch. Bonnie arrived hungry.

“Do me a favor and tell him again,” Julie said to her. “HUAC, McCarthy, the blacklist, the witchhunt. He won't listen to me. What the hell do I know? I'm unemployable.” She went off to the kitchen.

“Oh, Christ,” Bonnie said. “Give me a drink.”

Luis found half a bottle of Scotch. “No ice, I'm afraid. We forgot to plug in the fridge.”

“That's classed as an Un-American Activity. Next thing, you'll tell me you listen to
The Flight of the Bumblebee.”

“Shouldn't I?”

“Rimsky-Korsakov, old sport. Russian.”

“He's dead.”

“Dead means nothing. Nobody mentions Rimsky-Korsakov on Voice of America, unless they want to get canned.”

“Is that the same as fired?” Luis stretched out on a settee. “I've been fired, several times. I don't think Voice of America circulated in Venezuela.”

“It's a radio station. In Europe. Beamed at the Iron Curtain. Paid for with US tax dollars.”

“Ah, I see. Propaganda.”

“No. Well, yes, some of it. The point is McCarthy and his sidekicks have got every government employee wetting himself in case someone tells McCarthy the guy prefers Prokofiev to Cole Porter, or he saw
The Battleship Potemkin
when he was in college in 1934, or he reads
War and Peace
in bed.” Bonnie ran out of breath.

“Tolstoy is vastly over-rated,” Luis said. “I would seriously question the judgment of anyone who wastes much time on
War and Peace”

“The hell with Tolstoy. This isn't about Tolstoy.”

“Potemkin
is different. I enjoyed the film enormously. The sequence of the baby-carriage bouncing down the steps is high comedy. Just thinking of it makes me hoot.”

“Enjoy your thoughts, friend. I know guys who've been kicked out of their jobs for less. And believe me, nobody's brave enough to screen
Potemkin
anywhere in the US”

“All governments are neurotic,” Luis said. He raised a foot to admire his new loafers. “I knew a British civil servant whose career was blighted when his wife said cricket was silly. Which it is. Of course, baseball is even sillier.”

“Ever seen a game?”

“Heavens, no.”

“Then you got no right to condemn it.”

“Goodness! What an intolerant nation you are.” He smirked at Julie, who had come out of the kitchen to get a Scotch. “I think I'm doing rather well,” he said.

“You quit thinking in '46,” she said, and went away.

“Forget baseball,” Bonnie said. “Take government of the people, by the people, for the people. Lincoln said it must never pass away. Well, buster, it's gone, and Voice of America's just one line on the tombstone.”

“For doing what, exactly?”

“Who cares? Poor bastards aren't accused of anything, so how can they defend themselves? What McCarthy says, goes. At Voice of America, half the staff went.”

Luis eased his shoulders. “I never listen to radio,” he said. “All gabble, gabble, gabble,”

“That's just an example. A symptom of the disease. Any level of government, McCarthy or HUAC just gives them a nasty look, and
kazaam!
Everyone's running in circles to prove he's loyal.”

“Yeah.” Julie was leaning on the kitchen door, listening. “And the best way to do that is fire the next guy.
He's
the traitor. Now you've done your duty. Country's safe. So are you.”

Luis shrugged. “Maybe the next guy
was
a traitor.”

“Who says?” Bonnie demanded.

“Yeah,” Julie said. “What if a guy went to a couple of Party meetings? Never joined, just listened. What if he had a dog called Molotov?” She went away again.

“I would ban all dog-owners on sight,” Luis said. “The world would be a better place without dogs.”

“You'd probably ban radio, too,” Bonnie said.

“Splendid idea. And shoot broadcasters on sight.”

“Forget it, Bonnie,” Julie called from the kitchen. “Just let it go.”

“Anyway,” Luis said. “I have no sympathy for government employees. What makes them think they deserve a job for life? Nobody else has one.”

“Not the point!” Bonnie was prowling the room. “There are men, and women too, who do their job well, get caught up in this witchhunt, disgraced, sacked, maybe they know what they're accused of, maybe they don't…”

“Ah! Now I understand.” Luis clicked his fingers. “Life isn't fair. Get the phone book, I'll find a dozen lawyers only too happy to take this dreadful Senator McCarthy to court.”

“You don't understand,” Bonnie said.

Julie reappeared. “He's got his head up his ass.” She went away.

“I'm the one with solutions,” Luis said. “You're in love with problems.”

“Listen: McCarthy never fires anyone. How can you sue him? What he does, he puts the fear of God into some dusty corner of government. Soybean subsidies. McCarthy makes a speech: he's found twenty-three Card-Carrying Communists in the Federal Government's Division of Soybean Subsidies! Instant panic. The Kremlin's got a plot to fuck up American farmers! Run for your lives!”

“Where's the proof?” Luis asked.

“Here's the clever bit,” Julie said. She was carrying a tray of soup and sandwiches.

“The Agriculture Department doesn't wait for proof,” Bonnie said. “They up and fire two dozen people.”

“Security risks,” Julie explained.

“Which just goes to show that McCarthy must have been right all along,” Bonnie said. “Each time he does that, he gets more power. He points, and everyone poops their pants.”

“He's unstoppable,” Julie said. “Like bubonic plague. Eat, eat.”

They moved to the table. Spoons got handed around. Bowls of soup. Salt was passed. “So now you know,” Bonnie said. “That smell you noticed when you got off the boat was fear.”

“Kindly explain one thing,” Luis said. “Why is the government interfering in the soybean market?”

“I quit,” Bonnie said.

“The government doesn't give a subsidy to new novels, does it?”

“I double-quit.”

“And good fiction is far more important than soybeans.”

“Drink your soup,” Julie told him, “before the strychnine gets cold.”

A mile to the south and three hundred yards to the east, Special Agent Prendergast was reviewing the Ten Banks Con with Agent Fisk. It didn't take long. They had a heap of witness statements which more or less agreed about what happened, and totally disagreed about what the guy looked like. No fingerprints. No physical evidence except the demand notes. And now the suspect Cabrillo had vanished.

“Too bad our Con Ed man didn't tail him,” Prendergast said.

“We didn't hire him for surveillance, sir,” Fisk said. “We hired him to burgle the apartment, period.”

“The Bureau doesn't burgle,” Prendergast said sharply. “When we send a man in, it's a black bag job. It gives us deniability. The Bureau has no record of last night.”

“Of course.” Fisk checked his fly. It had become an automatic reaction when he made a procedural blunder. All fully zipped. “I still think it was Cabrillo,” he said. “We locate him, he vanishes. Too big a coincidence.”

“Maybe. Did he know we located him? If he didn't know, why would he stick around? This is New York. People move. What do we know about the Conroy woman?”

“She's broke, sir. Owed rent. Maybe that was his motive for hitting the banks.”

“So now he's rich. Why doesn't he just pay the rent?” Fisk had no answer. “The man we want is a thinker,” Prendergast said. “Most criminals like to act but hate to think, because thinking is such an effort. He's the opposite. Couldn't rob a gas station if you gave him Genghis Khan for back-up. All his activity is
between the ears. That's where we'll catch him. He thinks he knows everything. Well, nobody knows everything.”

Harding had been with MI5 or MI6 since the beginning of the Hitler war, and he had no illusions about the kind of men who were attracted to work in intelligence. Some were crooks. The winds of war scattered money and they wanted it. Some were dreamers, romantics who believed secrecy had a magic quality. Some were crusaders, determined to save their country by subterfuge. These types were dangerous men who killed their friends and chalked it up to bad luck, and went on and did it again. Fortunately they were few, and usually, in time, they managed to kill themselves.

Most of the other people in intelligence were as sober and hardworking as accountants but secrecy breeds arrogance as night grows mushrooms, and every intelligence organization has its share of shits. Harding had known the good and the bad. The best of the good, in his opinion—the cleverest, most balanced, certainly most successful and yet still the most approachable—was Kim Philby. Shame about the early retirement: a great waste, Harding thought. Still, friends were friends. He made it his business to know Kim's home number.

Early in the afternoon, he called Philby and reported that a search had turned up no sign of Eldorado's manuscript autobiography. “Of course it may be in a suitcase in a locker in Penn Station.”

“Or it may be on a publisher's desk,” Philby said.

“Yes.”

Pause.

“Even from three thousand miles, I can hear you wondering,” Philby said. They both laughed. “Why should it matter? War's long since over. We won. Who cares what a superannuated double agent has to say?”

“But you care, sir.”

“Luis Cabrillo has more enemies than he knows, some of them quite frightful types. It would be unwise to excite them. Luis worked day and night for the Allies. Hate to see him killed.”

“All three of us agree on that, sir.”

It won a chuckle from Philby, which made Harding's day.

Luis annoyed Bonnie Scott.

She'd given up talking about the blacklist and the witchhunt to anyone who wasn't in the firing line. People didn't want to know. Some were crusading anti-Communist bigots. Some were tired survivors of the Depression years who would agree with anything rather than risk losing their jobs. Most were ordinary Americans with a gut feeling that McCarthy must have stumbled across some vast Commie conspiracy, otherwise why all this panic every time he turned over another rock? So what if he didn't have class? Who would you sooner have as sheriff: John Wayne or Fred Astaire? Well, then.

But Luis Cabrillo was a clean sheet. He arrived in New York knowing nothing about McCarthyism, and when he was told, he refused to take it seriously. His dismissive shrug infuriated Bonnie. She phoned Max at his fortified apartment on Avenue C. Max had a suggestion. “Billy Jago,” he said. “Let's go now.”

“Will he be in?”

“Is Bismark a herring? See you at the ferry.”

Bonnie, Julie and Luis went by subway. They took the express and got off at South Ferry. “Told you it was fast,” Julie said to him.

“Not fast enough. A chap can take only so much advice about rectal itch.”

Max was waiting for them. He looked pleased. An old friend had promised him work, recording radio commercials for Standard Oil of Indiana. He couldn't do it as Max Webber, so he was calling himself David Meyer. “Guy I knew in the army,” he said. “Got hit by artillery, ours, theirs, who cares? We shoveled Italian dirt into a mattress cover and buried it and called it Meyer. So now I use his name. Touching, ain't it?”

They were getting on the boat.

“You've got a very recognizable voice, Max,” Bonnie said.

“Nobody's going to recognize me in Indiana. Hog-callin', that's their idea of vocal talent. And I get paid cash.”